Love with Francesca

What if some of the patterns you're struggling with in your relationship didn't actually start with you?
In this episode, I sit down with Owen Smithyman, who practices Peak States Therapy, to explore how trauma, generational patterns, and deeply ingrained associations can influence the way we show up in our relationships—even when we can't identify an obvious reason for why we feel anxious, insecure, or stuck.
We talk about how our past experiences can become a kind of blueprint for what feels familiar and safe, and how those patterns can show up in our romantic relationships through over-giving, self-sacrifice, conflict, insecurity, or even self-sabotage. Owen explains how his approach works with what he describes as associational and generational trauma, and how working with those underlying responses can sometimes create more harmony and connection—or help someone gain clarity that a relationship isn't right for them.
This conversation explores:
✨ How childhood and generational experiences can influence the way we navigate relationships✨ Why you can struggle internally even when your life looks “great” from the outside✨ The connection between trauma, nervous-system responses, and relationship triggers✨ Why we sometimes repeat familiar relationship dynamics without realizing it✨ How self-sacrifice and difficulty prioritizing yourself can be connected to inherited patterns✨ Why healing your own triggers can help you see your relationship more clearly✨ How doing deeper internal work can lead to either more connection or the realization that it's time to leave✨ Why having trauma or adversity doesn't mean you're broken
Connect with Owen Smithyman:Website: Optimize ConsciousnessInstagram: @optimizeconsciousness🎁 Free Gift: Free Guided Processes from Owen
His free resources include guided processes designed to help with things like resistance to positive change, self-sabotage, insecurity, and projection.
Connect with Francesca:❤️ Download your free “Should I Stay or Leave” Guide
🦋 Join the Reclaiming Love Community
📷 Instagram: Love with Francesca
✨ Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Your support helps keep these conversations alive!

Sometimes the path you're meant to follow doesn't look anything like the one you imagined.
In this solo episode, I take you behind the scenes of a major career decision I've been quietly working toward for years: finishing the process to become a psychotherapist.
After earning my master's in Mental Health Counseling, I didn't immediately pursue licensure. Instead, I followed unexpected opportunities in life coaching, built my own business, and spent years helping women navigate relationships and reconnect with themselves. Along the way, I learned that purpose isn't something you discover overnight—it's something that unfolds as you're willing to listen to yourself.
I share why I chose to trust my intuition, even when other people questioned my decisions, and why I'm finally stepping into this next chapter. I also talk about the importance of making mental health support more accessible, and how that value ultimately influenced this decision.
This episode explores:
Why your purpose often reveals itself through experience, not certainty
Learning to trust your intuition instead of outside expectations
The difference between following a career path and following your calling
Why it's okay if your journey doesn't look linear
How every season prepares you for the next one
Why accessibility has become one of my core professional values
What's changing for Love with Francesca as I begin this new chapter
This conversation is for anyone who feels behind, uncertain, or worried they're taking the "wrong" path.
Maybe you're not lost.
Maybe you're exactly where you need to be to become the person you're meant to be.
Connect with Francesca:
❤️ Download your free “Should I Stay or Leave” Guide
🦋 Join the Reclaiming Love Community
📷 Instagram: Love with Francesca
✨ Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Your support helps keep these conversations alive!

One of the hardest questions you can ask yourself in a relationship is:
"Am I investing in the right person?"
It's a question so many women ask when they're in a long-term relationship that feels uncertain, painful, or full of growing pains. But the answer isn't always as simple as deciding whether to stay or leave.
In this solo episode, I unpack how I wrestled with this question in my own relationship and why, looking back, it wasn't just about my husband. It was also about learning to trust myself, my intuition, and my own decision-making after years of questioning it.
This episode dives into:
Why time alone isn't a reason to stay in a relationship
The difference between investing in someone's potential versus ignoring reality
What healthy growth actually looks like in a long-term partnership
The signs that someone is willing to take accountability, repair, and evolve
Why your own fear and self-doubt can make it difficult to trust your decisions
How to evaluate whether your emotional energy is being invested in something that can truly grow
This isn't about finding the "perfect" partner.
It's about learning how to discern whether the relationship you're building has a strong foundation, mutual effort, and the willingness to grow together.
If you've ever found yourself asking, "Am I investing in the right person?", this episode will help you look beyond fear and toward clarity.
Connect with Francesca:
📷 Instagram: Love with Francesca
🌱 FREE Reclaiming Love Community
✨ Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Your support helps keep these conversations alive!

When we look at happy, healthy relationships, it’s easy to assume they’ve always been that way.
We see the connection, the ease, the affection, and the partnership, but we rarely see the years of difficult conversations, misunderstandings, growth, and repair that happened behind the scenes.
In this solo episode, I share a more personal side of my own relationship journey and talk about something I think we don’t discuss enough: the space between where your relationship is now and where it could become.
For years, my husband and I struggled with communication, conflict, distance, and different relationship needs. There were seasons when things felt incredibly hard, and moments when it would have been easier to walk away than continue doing the work.
But what I’ve learned is that hard doesn’t automatically mean wrong.
Sometimes, what feels broken is actually a relationship that’s still growing.
In this episode, we explore:
✨ Why healthy relationships are built, not found ✨ The reality behind “relationship goals” couples ✨ How difficult conversations create deeper connection over time ✨ Why conflict doesn’t automatically mean your relationship is failing ✨ The difference between a relationship that needs work and one that truly isn’t aligned ✨ Why the work you do on yourself is never wasted, regardless of the outcome
This conversation is for anyone who feels discouraged, stuck, or uncertain in their relationship and wonders if they’re failing.
Because sometimes, the relationship you want isn’t impossible.
You’re just not there yet.
 
Connect with Francesca:
📷 Instagram: Love with Francesca
🌱 FREE Reclaiming Love Community
✨ Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Your support helps keep these conversations alive!

Motherhood is often described as one of the most beautiful seasons of life, but for many women, it can also be one of the most overwhelming.
In this episode, I sit down with Brooke Bridges, mental health advocate, speaker, and coach, to have an honest conversation about postpartum anxiety, identity shifts, and the emotional realities that so many women experience after becoming mothers.
Brooke shares her personal journey with anxiety, from growing up in the entertainment industry to navigating motherhood and discovering how postpartum anxiety can affect even women who have already done significant inner work.
Together, we explore the pressure many women feel to have it all together, the isolation that can come with motherhood, and why having the right tools, support, and community can make all the difference.
This conversation explores:
The difference between everyday anxiety and postpartum anxiety
Why motherhood can amplify existing mental health struggles
The identity shifts that happen after becoming a parent
How societal expectations keep women suffering in silence
The importance of community, support, and asking for help
Why healing starts with honesty about what you're experiencing
This episode is a reminder that you are not failing if motherhood feels harder than you expected.
You are not alone.
Connect with Brooke Bridges: Website: https://www.unearthingwellness.co/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brookembridges
✨ Brooke is currently accepting 1:1 Coaching clients for women looking for support in their mental health, personal growth, and healing journey. 
Connect with Francesca:
📷 Instagram: Love with Francesca
🌱 FREE Reclaiming Love Community
✨ Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Your support helps keep these conversations alive!

What do you do when you’ve been waiting for your partner to change… and they still don’t?
When they don’t show up for the conversations, the connection, the emotional support, or the relationship the way you’ve been hoping they would, it’s easy to get stuck in the painful loop of asking: Should I stay or should I leave?
In this solo episode, I explore a shift that completely changed my life and my relationships: learning to choose myself even when someone else wasn’t showing up the way I needed them to.
We explore:
The loneliness of feeling alone inside a relationship
Why focusing on what they aren’t doing keeps you stuck
How to stop waiting to be prioritized before prioritizing yourself
What “choosing yourself” actually looks like in real life
Why meeting your own needs isn’t selfish
How self-abandonment keeps you trapped in relationship limbo
The clarity that emerges when you stop trying to prove your worth and start honoring it
This episode is an invitation to redirect your energy away from trying to change someone else and back toward your own healing, joy, and sense of self.
Because sometimes the relationship doesn’t need to change first.
Sometimes, you do.
Connect with Francesca:
📷 Instagram: Love with Francesca
🌱 FREE Reclaiming Love Community
✨ Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Your support helps keep these conversations alive!

Breakups are painful, but often, what hurts most isn’t just losing the person. It’s grieving the future you imagined with them, the routines you built together, and the version of yourself that existed inside the relationship.
In this episode, I sit down with Tisha Monee, relationship coach and author, to explore what healing after a breakup actually looks like beyond the surface-level advice.
This conversation explores:
Why breakups disrupt your nervous system and daily routines
The importance of 30 days of no-contact for clarity and healing
Why missing someone is a normal human response, not a sign you should go back
How self-abandonment and overextending show up in relationships
Why healing begins when you stop focusing only on what they did, and start reflecting on yourself
The connection between self-worth, accountability, and the relationships we choose
This episode is about more than moving on, it’s about learning how to come home to yourself after heartbreak.
Connect with Tisha Monee:
📘 Book: The Breakup That Brought Me Back to Me: How I Got Over My Ex in 45 Days📷 Instagram: @tishamonee
Connect with Francesca:
📷 Instagram: Love with Francesca
🌱 FREE Reclaiming Love Community
✨ Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Your support helps keep these conversations alive!

“It’s not that bad.” “I’m probably just being too sensitive.” “It’s fine.”
For many women, minimizing becomes a survival strategy in relationships, a way to avoid conflict, keep the peace, and protect connection.
But over time, constantly silencing your feelings comes at a cost.
In this solo episode, I unpack what minimizing actually looks like in real life, why so many women unconsciously do it, and how this pattern slowly disconnects you from your own needs, emotions, and inner truth.
This episode dives into:
Why minimizing feels “safe” in the short term
How suppressing your feelings creates resentment over time
The connection between minimizing and self-abandonment
Why emotional honesty is an act of self-respect
How to start acknowledging your truth without blowing up your relationship
This isn’t about becoming dramatic or starting unnecessary conflict. It’s about learning to listen to yourself honestly and creating relationships where your needs and emotions have space to exist.
If you’ve been telling yourself “it’s fine” while quietly hurting inside, this episode is for you.
Connect with Francesca:
📷 Instagram: Love with Francesca
🌱 FREE Reclaiming Love Community
✨ Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Your support helps keep these conversations alive!

Intimacy isn’t just about physical connection. It’s about trust, safety, and the ability to fully show up as yourself in a relationship.
In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Tabitha, psychotherapist and intimacy expert, to explore why intimacy often fades in long-term relationships, and what it actually takes to rebuild it.
We dive into how many women slowly disconnect from themselves through over-giving, people-pleasing, and self-abandonment, and how that disconnection directly impacts desire, attraction, and emotional closeness.
Dr. Tabitha shares how intimacy is deeply connected to the nervous system, and why feeling safe in your body and within yourself is the foundation for real connection with your partner.
This conversation explores:
Why intimacy is more about emotional safety than physical connection
How self-abandonment leads to resentment and disconnection
The role of trauma and the nervous system in relationships
Why desire doesn’t disappear, it becomes dormant
How reconnecting with yourself is the key to reigniting intimacy
This isn’t about trying to fix your partner or force connection. It’s about coming back to yourself first, so intimacy can naturally follow.
Connect with Dr. Tabitha:
Her website
Her instagram
Connect with Francesca:
Follow me on Instagram
Join our Reclaiming Love Collective and get connected with other women just like you looking to figure out whether they should stay or leave their long-term relationship!
✨ Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Your support helps keep these conversations alive!

Feeling like a burden isn’t always something someone explicitly told you.
It’s often a quiet, internalized belief shaped over time, through subtle messages, expectations, and the roles you learned to play in relationships.
In this solo episode, I unpack what it really means to carry the belief that you are “too much,” and how that shows up in your relationships, especially in long-term partnerships.
We explore how many women were conditioned to prioritize others, stay small, and feel grateful for the bare minimum, and how that leads to self-abandonment, resentment, and difficulty asking for more.
I also dive into the deeper layers of:
Why you feel like a burden even if no one said it directly
How this belief impacts your ability to receive love, care, and attention
The anger and resentment that build when your needs go unmet
Why that anger is actually a healthy signal, not something to suppress
The patterns we co-create in relationships without realizing it
This isn’t about blaming your partner or trying to change them. It’s about turning inward, understanding your patterns, and learning to receive what you truly deserve.
If you’ve ever felt like asking for more makes you “too much,” this episode is for you.
Connect with me!
- Follow me on Instagram @lovewithfrancesca- Join my Reclaiming Love Community and get connected with other women just like you looking to figure out whether they should stay or leave their long-term relationship!
✨ Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Your support helps keep these conversations alive!