PODCAST · health
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
by Dana Skaggs: psychotherapist and keynote speaker
Phoenix and Flame is a podcast by Dana Skaggs, M.A. She is called the "Queen of Boundaries" as well as the "Sassy Psychotherapist." Her podcast is about going From Ash to Flight on the Wings of Boundaries. If you feel alone in your struggle, check out the candid interviews with inspiring guests.You'll hear their authentic journey through struggle, what helped them, what hurt them, and how they finally rose from the ashes. Dana asks direct, thought-provoking questions infused with snarky humor and therapeutic commentary, designed so her listeners will take away useful and applicable rubber-meets-the-road coping strategies.
Episodes
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Why HR Needs a Seat at the Table
First aired 10/18/2026 You've spoken up. You've set the boundary. Two years later, nothing has changed. For a lot of high performers, that's the moment burnout sets in and they quietly check out. In this episode, Dana sits down with Timothy Ernst, an HR and organizational development leader with...
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Why Men Refuse to Admit They're Struggling
First aired September 6, 2026 Dennis Bairos oversees more than 29 fitness locations across Texas, and somewhere between the grand openings and the late-night emails, he noticed a pattern: he was the guy who'd rather miss a flight than admit he needed help, the coach whose sideline energy made his...
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Why Your Nervous System Won't Let You Rest
First aired September 6, 2026 Dr. Charleanea Arellano has spent over 30 years as a clinical psychologist and leadership coach, but the framework she's best known for now, the Embodied Narrative Framework, didn't come from a textbook. It came from putting away laundry five years ago and noticing…
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Why Business Leaders Need Negotiation Skills
First aired August 23, 2026 Annette Mullin spent 24 years with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, nine of them as a crisis negotiator, eventually leading one of the busiest negotiation teams in the country â€" averaging over 100 call-outs a year. She worked patrol, sexual assault,...
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Why Comedy Might Be the Best Medicine For Mental Health
First aired August 16, 2026 For over a decade, Dave Mowry couldn't get out of bed, couldn't shower, and couldn't walk to his own mailbox without waiting until dark so a neighbor wouldn't catch the look in his eyes. In 1994, a psychotic break sent the successful businessman and family man into a...
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Why Imposter Syndrome Keeps Leaders Stuck
In this episode, Dana is joined by Kurt Bush, a trauma-informed coach who helps leaders move from imposter syndrome to authentic confidence. Kurt shares his own journey with imposter syndrome, from feeling like a fraud in corporate leadership meetings to realizing his true calling. He explains…
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Your Midlife 'Crisis' Might Be Burnout (with Jody Brooks)
A midlife crisis isn't actually a crisis. That's the challenge Jody Brooks puts to anyone who's ever felt lost, restless, or quietly convinced something's wrong with them somewhere around 40 or 50: what looks like burnout, and what people love to write off as a freakout, is more often a calling....
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How You Can Find Hope After Rock Bottom (Aaron Ryan)
Two in the morning. Sitting on the toilet, clothed, bawling into a pillow, because a broken PC was the last thing standing between him and the self-employed life he wanted so badly he could feel it in his teeth. That's where my guest this week hit rock bottom: not one dramatic collapse, but…
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How Your Body's Intuition Can Heal You (Rebecca Russell)
Four years of chronic pain. A fibromyalgia diagnosis. Muscle relaxers, pain pills, migraines, MRI after MRI. And through all of it, my guest this week kept hearing the same quiet voice: something doesn't fit. Rebecca Russell listened to it anyway, tracked down a neurosurgeon, and asked for one…
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Why Successful Entrepreneurs Set Boundaries (Chris Shurian)
My guest this week has a word for himself I'd never heard before: "entrepreholic." Over 39 years, Chris Shurian has built, operated, bought, broken, and resurrected companies in remodeling, construction, manufacturing, real estate development, foreign investment, hospitality, restaurants, and...
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Why Loneliness Hits the Young Hardest (Dr. Anthony Silard)
Picture a hand-written sign taped to a bus stop in Japan: "I'm 87, I don't have a family. Would some family take me?" No one answered. He died a couple of months later. That story, from my guest this week, is the starkest snapshot I've ever heard of what loneliness researcher Dr. Anthony Silard...
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Avoiding Failure Guarantees It (with Mark DeCarlo)
Picture a high school track meet: a sixteen-pound shot put thrown the wrong direction, a burst spleen, three weeks in a hospital bed. That's how my guest this week learned, at sixteen or seventeen, that avoiding failure is exactly what guarantees it. Mark DeCarlo woke up after three days...
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Why Young Adults Are More Stuck Than Ever (Joanna Lilley)
Would your young adult be able to survive without you? That's the question my guest Joanna Lilley says every parent should be able to answer, and if your gut response is "no" or "I don't know," she's got thoughts. Joanna is a therapeutic consultant who works exclusively with what she calls...
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How to Trust Your Intuition After Trauma (Mandi Pratt)
Picture coming home to a business card tucked into your door jamb. It says "coroner's unit, robbery unit," with a handwritten note: call me please. That's how my guest Mandi Pratt found out, a year after leaving an abusive marriage, that the FBI had been hunting her ex-husband for six to nine...
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How to Reclaim Your Energy When Burned Out (Dianne Andree)
Picture a school counselor's office with a shoebox of sand tucked under the desk. A parent is on the phone getting heated, and while she listens, my guest slips off one shoe and presses her foot into the sand until she can practically smell the ocean. Thirty seconds later, she's steady again.…
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How Narcissists Control You (Jackie Miller)
Jackie Miller is wandering her own weed-filled backyard in her pajamas and slippers, late afternoon in the middle of summer, hasn't showered, hasn't eaten, and can't quite remember how she got there, worn down by exactly the hidden tactics narcissists use to control you. That's the moment Jackie…
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Find Purpose in Your Biggest Struggles (Holly Kostrzewski)
Picture an 18-year-old walking into the office of the disability advisor at a college she'd already decided to skip, after a neuropsych test predicted she probably wouldn't succeed there, and asking: "What classes can you take with half a brain?" That's a true story, and it's how this episode on...
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How to Reclaim Your Power from Shame (with Emma Lyons)
A gentle note before you dive in: this conversation touches on childhood suicidal ideation. It's okay to pause, skip ahead, or come back to this one another time. There's an old horror-movie line: the call is coming from inside the house. That's basically the image trauma-informed healer Emma…
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How Ego Is Sabotaging Your Leadership (with Chris Gillen)
A gentle note before you dive in: this conversation touches on suicide loss. It's okay to pause, skip ahead, or come back to this one another time. Chris Gillen was born into what he calls "a family of professional victims." His dad could never own a decision: everything was somebody else's…
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The Science Behind Trust and Self-Betrayal
In this episode, Dana is joined by Clay Moffat, an ex-Navy weapons tech turned behavioral coach and author of The Trust Trap. Clay offers a radical reframe on trust, arguing it isn't a character trait but a dynamic process of alignment that requires constant evaluation. He reveals why we are the...
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The Science of Laughter Yoga (with Cathy Nesbitt)
Picture about a hundred picketers at a Toronto garbage strike, a private investigator filming the scene in case of trouble, and one woman walking straight into the middle of it wearing a homemade "Worm Away Your Garbage" T-shirt. That's Cathy Nesbitt, and it's just one chapter in twenty-three…
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How to Build Workplace Culture (with Victoria Mattingly)
Picture a Pittsburgh brewery on a summer night: live music, a courtyard in a city that's 25 percent Black, and a crowd that isn't. One Black man walks in, looks around, sits down, and leaves before anyone says a word to him. That's the six-dollar-beer story organizational psychologist Dr.…
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How to Rebuild Your Faith After Divorce (with Sarah Brown)
Picture it: married young in college, ten years in, life looking the way it's supposed to, and then the rug gets ripped out from under you. That's exactly what happened to my guest Sarah Brown: an unexpected divorce, sudden single motherhood, and a crisis of faith after divorce she never saw...
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Reframing Struggle as Growth (with Brianna Brown Keen)
A gentle note before you dive in: this conversation touches on severe bullying and self-harm. It's okay to pause, skip ahead, or come back to this one another time. My guest Brianna Brown Keen was 14 when bullying so severe it landed her in the hospital, bullying so bad that her best friend's own...
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How to Network With Confidence (with Amy Siegfried)
Stand in the doorway of a networking event with a thousand strangers inside, and tell me your palms don't sweat. Mine do. So do my guest Amy Siegfried's, and she's spent more than 20 years teaching people how to network with confidence anyway. Amy calls herself a recovering "awkward kid" who…
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Overcoming Self-Sabotage (with Dr. Albert Bramante)
My guest today spends his days representing actors, and he kept noticing the same maddening pattern: talented people telling him how badly they wanted the job, then blowing off the audition that would have gotten it to them. Self-sabotage isn't a character flaw, and Dr. Albert Bramante built an...
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The Wheel of Fear: Rhonda Britten's Path to Fearless Living
A gentle note before you dive in: this conversation touches on murder-suicide and suicide attempts. It's okay to pause, skip ahead, or come back to this one another time. It's Father's Day. A little tiny town in Upper Michigan, two restaurants, snow in May. My guest is 14 years old, standing in…
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How to Overcome Burnout (with Jessica Hallahan)
What does it actually take to make someone stop long enough to overcome burnout instead of just pushing through it? For Jessica Hallahan the answer was a hospital bed at 24: covered in hives, twenty pounds lighter in a month, her knees too swollen to zip her own jeans, and fighting to keep her…
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Why the 9-to-5 Is Failing Working Moms (Heather Powers)
"We want a wife too." That's the joke Heather Powers and her girlfriends at work used to make: someone at home scheduling the appointments, running to the dry cleaners, keeping the household Tetris moving so they could focus at the office. Heather has spent almost 19 years as a working mom in...
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How to Know If You're an Addict (with Dr. Cali Estes)
A gentle note before you dive in: this conversation touches on addiction and loss of a spouse. It's okay to pause, skip ahead, or come back to this one another time. Dr. Cali Estes was sitting on her floor eating cake with her hands, crying, with cake on the wall and cake on the dog, when her...
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Your Logical vs. Subconscious Mind: Who's Really in Control?
In this episode, Dana is joined by Kate Semeniuk, a Rapid Transformational Hypnotherapist, to explore the unseen forces in our minds that hold us back. Have you ever known logically what you need to do—like set a boundary or say no—but found yourself unable to act? Kate reveals how subconscious...
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Spot Burnout Before It's Too Late (with Michael Levitt)
The cardiologist walked in, looked at the chart, and skipped hello. He looked Michael Levitt dead in the eye and said, "You know, you should be dead right now." Michael's first wife and mother, sitting beside him, started crying. Michael looked back and said, "I see you skipped a bedside manner...
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Overcoming Success-Fueled Anxiety (with Matt Gerlach)
Matt Gerlach built himself a million-dollar-a-year consulting business, and twice ended up in the hospital convinced he was having a heart attack. The day he started that business, eight years ago, what he calls "obsessive worrying" moved in and never left. He smoked a pack of cigarettes a day,...
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The Power of Unconditional Generosity
Host Dana Skaggs sits down with Abagail McKiernan, founder of the nonprofit HelpLink, to uncover the deeply personal story that inspired her mission. What began as a moment of isolation became a movement rooted in unconditional generosity. Together, they explore how giving without expectation can...
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How to Actually Forgive Someone (with Katharine Giovanni)
A gentle note before you dive in: this conversation touches on sexual assault. It's okay to pause, skip ahead, or come back to this one another time. Katharine Giovanni attempted suicide in the eighth grade. She grew up in what she calls a "pickled family" (both parents were alcoholics), got...
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Breaking the Masculinity Trap (with Kristal Desantis)
A patient once told me, in confidence, that his love language was physical touch, but he couldn't just ask for it. So instead he leaned into a reputation as a player and used sex as the vehicle to get the one thing he actually wanted: to be held. That story is exactly why traditional masculinity…
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Healing Relational Trauma to Find Purpose (with Barb Nangle)
My guest became friends with a homeless man from her church and took it as a sign from God, confirmation that her volunteer work with homeless people was on the right track. A few months later, during a snowstorm, she invited him to stay in her home instead of a shelter, because, she says, "I'm a...
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How to Adapt at Work Without Drowning (with Craig Mattson)
One of my guest's interview subjects took a fully remote marketing job and spent her first weeks scanning her new coworkers' faces on Zoom, trying to find any signal for what actually mattered at that company. She'd read a coworker's email and think, that has to be sarcasm. Then she'd get on…
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Survival Brain Sabotaging Happiness (with Matt O'Neill)
My guest bought a little plastic herb keeper for his fridge, all excited about eating fresher food. His daughter picked it up, immediately threw it on the ground, and it broke into a million pieces. He didn't yell. He didn't say a word. He just turned his back on her. That quiet moment, he says…
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Why Neurodiversity Matters at Work (with Khushboo Chabria)
Picture a teenager waking up at 3 a.m. to study for AP Biology, reading the same paragraph over and over, and it just will not go in. That was Khushboo Chabria in high school, years before anyone said the word ADHD to her. She carried that "something is wrong with me" feeling all the way into her...
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How to Stop Living Someone Else's Life (with Arnold Beekes)
Someone asks you a simple question, "What do you want?" and your brain just stops. Not stalls. Stops. That's what happened to coach Arnold Beekes in his first coaching session, in his 40s, after decades running technology and organizational leadership teams. Nobody had ever asked him that before....
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How Unresolved Trauma Is Ruling Your Life
In this episode, Brad Chandler shares his journey of overcoming unresolved childhood trauma. Brad reveals how his subconscious belief of "not being enough" led to two divorces, millions in business losses, and struggles with anxiety and addiction. He explains that these negative behaviors were…
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Stop Winging It: A Resilience Plan (with Dr. MH Pelletier)
Chapter one of my guest's book is called "You're Fabulous and At Risk," and that's basically the resilience plan talk your inner high-achiever needs. Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier, a psychologist, executive coach, and author of The Resilience Plan, spends her career telling capable, driven leaders…
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From Homelessness to Faith and Fitness (with Petar Krastev)
Ten euros was all fitness coach Petar Krastev had when he left Bulgaria at 22, headed for eighteen months of homelessness in a UK lock-up garage with no electricity or running water. He was fleeing unpaid bills and a toxic relationship he couldn't simply walk away from (there was a two-year-old...
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Break Free From Limiting Beliefs (with Yvonne Trost)
Limiting beliefs are the invisible walls we build before we're even old enough to know we're building them, and my guest, happiness coach Yvonne Trost, found hers out the hard way: in an actual apartment fire that took everything she owned. Yvonne is the co-founder of Limitless You, and she's…
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From Adversity to CEO: Victoria Pelletier's Journey
Picture an 11-year-old kid clocking hours at a hair salon, doing everything except the actual hair, because nobody else was going to hand her a better life. By 14 she was assistant manager of a shoe store, bossing around employees twice her age. By 24 she was a chief operating officer. That's how...
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Nobody Cares Until You Do (with Robert Hunt)
In 2019, Robert Hunt and his wife Cathy sat down and did the math they'd been avoiding: $90,000 in debt, not counting the house or the cars. They'd spent years angry at God, angry at the economy, angry at their clients, asking why the blessings weren't coming. Robert says God's answer, as he…
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Trusting Your Intuition in Business (Winnie Rodgers)
Winnie Rodgers describes a specific, strange feeling: standing outside her own body, looking down at herself, thinking "nothing is wrong here" while everything in her actually knew something was wrong. Intellectually, on paper, her life checked every box. Her real estate business was thriving.…
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Stop Believing Every Thought You Have (Mette Reebirk)
Close your eyes for a second. Go ahead, really do it. Mette Reebirk asked me to try this live on the show, and within a breath there was a voice in my head going, "this is weird, I hope this doesn't last too long." Then a second voice: "come on, be positive, she has a plan." Then Mette asks the...
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Boundaries - Why Can't I Set Them?
In this solo episode, Dana Skaggs explores the complexities of setting and defending personal boundaries. She discusses the importance of understanding one's own emotional landscape, the fear of rejection, and the impact of past wounds on current behavior. Dana emphasizes the need for...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Phoenix and Flame is a podcast by Dana Skaggs, M.A. She is called the "Queen of Boundaries" as well as the "Sassy Psychotherapist." Her podcast is about going From Ash to Flight on the Wings of Boundaries. If you feel alone in your struggle, check out the candid interviews with inspiring guests.You'll hear their authentic journey through struggle, what helped them, what hurt them, and how they finally rose from the ashes. Dana asks direct, thought-provoking questions infused with snarky humor and therapeutic commentary, designed so her listeners will take away useful and applicable rubber-meets-the-road coping strategies.
HOSTED BY
Dana Skaggs: psychotherapist and keynote speaker
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Phoenix and Flame Podcast have?
Phoenix and Flame Podcast currently has 182 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Phoenix and Flame Podcast about?
Phoenix and Flame is a podcast by Dana Skaggs, M.A. She is called the "Queen of Boundaries" as well as the "Sassy Psychotherapist." Her podcast is about going From Ash to Flight on the Wings of Boundaries. If you feel alone in your struggle, check out the candid interviews with inspiring...
How often does Phoenix and Flame Podcast release new episodes?
Phoenix and Flame Podcast publishes regularly with 182 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Phoenix and Flame Podcast?
You can listen to Phoenix and Flame Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Phoenix and Flame Podcast?
Phoenix and Flame Podcast is created and hosted by Dana Skaggs: psychotherapist and keynote speaker.
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