I Couldn't Ignore It Anymore: Victoria Solomon on Self-Worth & Relationships

0:00And it was like the pack of cards just crashed to the ground. It was like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole because I was like, no, you have no idea. It's not like that. So it was those two things and something, something just crashed. So it was actually his perception as well. So it's interesting, isn't it? Because there'd be my daughter naming and shaming seeing the inside. And then there was someone else who was looking at it from the outside. And he basically, he was just messaging me saying, you know, I'd always loved you, you were this, you were that.

0:45And it was the other end. It was the other part of the spectrum. And I was so starved, a feeling honored and feeling special and feeling acknowledged and feeling valuable and feeling sexy and feeling authentic and honest and real. Hi, I'm Debbie Thompson and this is A Stone in My Shoe. The podcast where we explore the quiet things that shape our lives and what can begin to shift when we start to notice what's really there. And today I'm joined by Victoria Solomon,

1:31mother of two adult daughters, international speaker, published author and the creator of the Excel system and get into your body methodology. Following years of helping people understand the relationship between the body, trauma and pain, Victoria experienced a deeply personal moment that she describes as one of her many triggers leading to a major change in her own life. And today we explore the moments that became impossible to ignore and what unfolded when she finally listened. Welcome, Victoria. Hello. Thank you so much for having me here, Debbie. Oh, it's a pleasure. It's lovely. Love you to have you from the UK. As people know, I'm traveling around Australia in a van

2:17and modern technology able to connect women from all over the world is just magical. It is. It definitely is that. So before we begin, I just want you to ground this for the woman listening to this episode. When she hears your story today, what do you hope she begins to see or understand about herself? That might seem completely unthinkable or untransformable to allow unlimited possibility of just cruel things can align in the way that is authentic and right for you

3:03and don't feel that you have to know it to believe it or you don't have to believe it to know it. I'm not sure. But yeah, unlimited possibility that you don't have to stay stuck. I think that's really important because so often when we're stuck we think we can solve the problem in our heads and often it's that in the issues in our heads that got us into it in the first place and it's rendering and letting go to something bigger than ourselves, isn't it? Where much wisdom comes or stuff we'd never conceived or thought about that we're allowed to come into our universe. It's funny because you're traveling around Australia

3:50and I remember 30 years ago I was traveling around Australia in 1997 actually so 96, 97 and it's when the artist's way it was around the time when the book The Artist's Way came out and the one thing I always remembered that was written in there was the quote jump and the net one up here and that is a quote that I have needed to remember my whole life since then, yeah. And that's a beautiful analogy jump and the net will appear. I get goosebumps when I say that because it is so powerful and so profound and so much trust in yourself

4:35and trust in things that will work out and I think sometimes that's quite challenging for people and we've all had to do it's not like it's the first time because we've all jumped and the net has appeared, haven't we? It's just what have we jumped from? Have we jumped from a very low wall step or have we jumped from something slightly higher where it's a little bit more scary? I think it's all about the height we're jumping from or what we're jumping onto and what we're jumping from. I think you're right and if you've only ever jumped from small platforms the thought of going to the next platform up is scary and the fear can hold you back.

5:22And also maybe your side isn't very good or maybe one of your feet is injured. There are many different things on there that could impact your capacity to jump. I know for me that was the case and maybe it's not prudent to jump at some point but then there comes a time when not jumping is not prudent. So we will get internet because that's a stone as we all have many stones but one of the stones we wanted to talk about today. Before we get into that, I just like to sort out a little bit more about you. Where are you in this season of your life and what matters most to you now? So I'm at the stage where my children are grown.

6:10They are literally standing on their own two feet. I'm still there as mother holding space in the background as in there's a home I keep going. So there's a roof if they need it, that kind of thing. But in terms of day to day, I have the extraordinary gift of my freedom on the other side of bringing up to daughters. And I use this freedom to travel. I use this freedom to teach. I use this freedom to grow my international wellness community around the world and to live my authentic life, almost a life that a few years ago I could only have dreamed of. I could never have imagined.

6:57I am absolutely obsessed with what I do and what I teach. I teach people to realign their biomechanics and their bones because I'm just obsessed with the 206 bones we have in our body. The 330 energy centers, which are joints where bones meet and teaching a human, male or female how to walk, how to literally biomechanically put one aligned foot in front of the other. So I have a published book that went bestseller and I'm growing my organization a lot at the moment, which is something I worked for years in clinic.

7:43I worked at thousands of hours when my children were children that needed taking care of my clinic. The years was just a five minute walk from my home opposite my younger daughter's school. So I lived in this very small kind of cocoon and local community. I always loved community. I always wanted to help create wellness in my local community. And now I think it's safe to say that my community has quite dramatically expanded. I travel a lot. I'm also a meditator. Do you know Joe Dispenza? You've heard of Dr. Joe Dispenza? Love Joe Dispenza, yes, absolutely. Okay, so I'm in his alumni of health

8:28and medical practitioners. So I get to have that as a really lovely network and community as well. So obviously I'm a big meditator, but ultimately, yeah, I just get to live an extraordinary life at the moment. And there is a lot of the jump in the net will appear. There is a lot of the unknown. There is much uncertainty, but there is also a sense of living from my truths and alignments, which is such a contrast to where I was at many, many other stages in my life. Yeah, and that's beautiful because I just wanted to, one of the main reasons I started this podcast was listening to Brony Ware's

9:16The Top Regret of the Dying, which is I wish I'd had the courage to live a life authentic to me and not what others expected. And that is exactly what you did literally on your metaphorical spiritual, whatever feat you jumped and you made it happen. But what was interesting, you said your life as you described it now was not how you even imagined or imagined was possible. Can you take us back to the time just when that stone appeared and you couldn't do anything more about it? And maybe looking back at that stone, how long it had been there and how long did you be ignoring it for? So about 10 years ago,

10:01it's where are we, we're in 19, sorry, we're in 2026 now. So in 2016, my older daughter was going to be 16. And she said something to me one day when yet again, she'd witnessed and heard her father speaking to me in a way that to her was intolerable and whether she knew it or not and whether I knew it or not was programming in the repeat most of my life in terms of what I was allowing

10:47to show up in my interactions with another significant human being. And it killed me, it killed me inside. I felt this sense of shame, this sense of guilt, this sense of, oh my God, what am I role modeling? If even, actually, I think she was 15, she wasn't quite 16 because I remember thinking, oh my God, and she's about to be 16. She, which is that kind of first legal age of being an adult. She's about to be 16 and this is what she's witnessing. So this is what she will learn to tolerate. And it wasn't that at that moment I did anything,

11:34but that was so, I remember when I was much younger, my friends would listen to my father or my brother talk to me and they would say to me, how can you let Kim talk to you like that? And as well as dealing with the impact of that person talking to me like that, it had this added layer of what I can only describe as victim shaming, not intentional victim shaming. These people actually cared about me when they were saying, how can you let him speak to you like that? And the crazy thing was that I was very anesthetized to being spoken to in that way. That was so my normal. That was so just what was safe,

12:21safer to tolerate than to stand up to. I didn't even know how to stand up to it. But to hear my daughter say that before the only cost was to me. So there was that two elements. There was that someone was able to act in a way that clearly wasn't loving to me. And I enabled that relationship so that could happen because I'm a great one now. Let's take our own responsibility, let's stand on our own two feet. So I'm not even making it about those people at all and making it about who I was that I was so anesthetized that I could tolerate what to these other people

13:09appear to be intolerable. And with my daughter, that was devastating because whereas before the cost was only to me with my daughter, I knew she was watching and learning. And as much as she might appear quite feisty and quite how can you let him be like that? I would never let someone be like that approach. What I also knew was but unconsciously, subconsciously that program would be going in. And more importantly, my younger daughter it was already functioning like that because she had a similar dynamic my ex-husband in terms of his perception of how he could behave

13:56than my older daughter had. So I just felt this level of shame, this level of self-hatred. And I felt powerless, hopeless, helpless because I truly didn't believe that I could stand on my own two feet if I left. I truly didn't know what the choice was. Hence I've always got a foot. I've always, my foot is like my heart because now what do I do? I travel the world literally, mechanically teaching a human to stand on their own two feet correctly in integrity so that their engagement and their stature in the world is such that they do not any point need to have their boundaries invaded

14:44or interestingly enough, they're engaged enough in themselves that no one would even think they could speak to you like that. And that's a hard one, Victoria, because when you have grown up with your generational patterns like that, your new norm is, this is acceptable. You haven't been taught to have boundaries to speak up for yourself, to feel safe enough to speak up for yourself because all these, and at that point that feeling of shame, was that the time where you could actually give it a name and a voice? Had it always been there bubbling somewhere in your shoe and it had all come up at that point

15:31as I cannot pass this on to another generation? I think the devastating thing to me was that my daughter only knew the tip of the iceberg. I think that was what really killed me. What really killed me was, oh my God, if she thinks that's bad, she should only know. And that was the most agonizing bit. And I felt, looking at my daughter, I felt just like this level of, oh my God, she just, what, where am I? Just where am I? It was almost like a reflection from your daughter

16:16holding up a mirror to say, I am worth so much more than this. I was once a 15 year old full of, I'm going to meet the love of my life who's going, and then something happens and you land up with someone who, as you said, is not loving. It's, it might be behavior that you're used to, but it's not loving and it's not what you deserve. So at that point, this sense of devastation and shame, what did you do? Because I can imagine stepping off that height. It was a kind of a cliff. Just stepping off and then it would appear would be very scary. So what did you do? Yeah, I didn't actively do anything. What I was, which I didn't realize

17:02was highly vulnerable to someone showing up in my life and being loving. And someone who I trusted showing up, someone who'd known me years and years before showing up and we'd been kids together. And just saying something to me where I can see you've got such a wonderful marriage and you've got an incredible life. And I was on this walk through the woods walking my dog and they were messaging me. And I was reading these words from him and it was like the pack of cards just crashed to the ground.

17:48It was like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole because I was like, no, you have no idea. It's not like that. So it was those two things and something just crashed. So it was actually his perception as well. So it's interesting, isn't it? Because there'd been my daughter naming and shaming being seeing the inside. And then there was someone else who was looking at it from the outside. And basically he was just messaging me saying I'd always loved you, you were this, you were that. And it was the other end. It was the other part of the spectrum. And I was so starved.

18:36A feeling honoured and feeling special and feeling acknowledged and feeling valuable and feeling sexy and feeling authentic and honest and real. And it was almost like that thing. They say, if you kick a dog enough at some point it will bite. And my ex-husband never dreamed. It's still harsh and hard to say this but he literally used to say, the thing I knew about being with you was that you were so desperate. You would never leave me. Or blessing, blessing. And also that isn't to make him wrong.

19:23That was his own psychological way of responding to his experience of life. So he wanted to feel, he was with a woman who would never leave him, basically. But the way that he would say, it's a different stone, isn't it? It's a completely different stone. And the right that's his wounds, his story. And exactly. Because this is not about making another human wrong. I don't need to do that. I'm far too grateful and happy to everything that has ever happened in my life to make that person, we come together,

20:08we weave in and out of each other's lives. But that was a very harsh dynamic to live in. And also to get to that point where these three things almost came together. It was like this perfect storm to go Victoria. I've been trying to tell you this for so long. You now need to take this and do something with it. So there was almost like a changing point that was there that where some things you would no longer tolerate, you couldn't ignore it anymore and certain things were impossible to carry on with. How did you, what were those things and how did you put them in place? Because you're not sitting at boundaries, you're changing the dynamic, you're changing the dance.

20:55No one likes the dance being changed. I didn't do it. I didn't do it in a loving way for myself, especially for my children. Certainly didn't do it in the loving way for him. I had what's known because I won't go into all the details but it ended up escalating in a very serious way. And I left, you know, the whole thing, the most dangerous part of leaving a dysfunctional relationship is when you decide to leave. So I'm not gonna go into all those deep details but all I can say is everything I believed I was and everything I believed I would never do because my family was the most important thing to me exploded.

21:41I became the person I never even imagined I could be in terms of destroying my marriage and turning everything upside down. I used another relationship to help me step out of my marriage because it was never going to make sense because the surface of my marriage looked so perfect and my ex-husband appeared to be doing so much wonderful things that it would have been almost impossible. It was impossible for anyone to understand. So I had to do the very thing in a way I was terrified of him doing which was create another relationship to leave

22:26because it was never gonna make sense. None of it made sense. It was crazy. It was crazy. And so I, the only way I could leave was by doing something which to me appeared to be so bad that would mean a marriage couldn't continue. And you look like a sledgehammer. Sorry, I literally just took an axe and hacked it and it took another couple of years before the truth of what was really the cause of all of that began to show up. But it would never have shown up and I would never have been able to prove the truth of why I left. I had to use a completely different mode.

23:15And it was agonising. It was the most devastating ordeal for myself, for my children, for him. It ended up with a good few years in court. It ended up, it was a nightmare. But within that nightmare, I had to learn to stand my ground, to stand on my own two feet, to stick to what was the truth and not the perception of truth. And I literally had to be rebuilt in from every system from the inside out.

24:00That is so interesting, isn't it? How sometimes we have to smash everything down to start again because it's from the embers of the fire that this new beautiful growth happens. Because perhaps if you hadn't smashed the whole thing with the axe, perhaps you'd just cut off the tree to have a suppling. Perhaps it would have still grown with some of those thoughts and perceptions about what you're worth and what you can tolerate. So it almost needed to shatter everything to rebuild who am I in an authentic, because what you said as well is the way you were living and the way people were perceiving you were just like chalk and cheese.

24:46And it's not like people went, oh my God, I'm not surprised you've left him or whatever, because the perception and the reality was so different. So perhaps it needed the axe. And without the axe it didn't because where on many levels I have empathy for him or sympathise for him is he met me at a very wounded stage in my life. My father had taken his life a few years before and both my father's parents had taken their lives. So I was a very wounded individual and he was able to come in and fill those cracks. That was our design.

25:31That was our codependent design. So he appeared very caring, peered very solid. Yeah, and I was like, oh, now I'm safe. But actually what I didn't realise was that he was almost concrete filling those cracks and had infiltrated me. And that's the power that he had initially became the very power that literally hurt me from the inside because our personalities and our beings actually had fundamentally very different truths and values. So it's not, that's very difficult.

26:17And as we know, we are developing all the time as well. Take all of that trauma and whatever out of it, just the fact that as humans we're developing all the time. Do we stay parallel with another human being or do we need to go in our different directions? And as we do that, the connection of us is being stretched and pulled and it's agonising. And it's like when you're in a three-legged race, yeah? You've got one leg where you're tied together and then the other legs are... And it's not comfortable, is it? If you're both kind of, you've got one leg tied together but the other is... So I think there were many aspects of it but there was also a very serious aspect. And yeah, I just send that with love that also for my children, for whatever reason,

27:03we experience that. And what they've seen now is that, wow, so a woman can do that. And I had one very angry daughter, a one daughter who needed me like her whole world depended on it. So going through that, because it did, her whole world did depend on me standing my ground and being there and being what I call a boundary beast. And yeah, I also had to experience that was very unpleasant for my other child. And so as a mother, oh my goodness. But I kept going, I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, I have a dog. He was like, every day, mom, I'm taking you for a walk,

27:49mom, I'm taking you for another walk. I had this little being as well who just got me into a structure and a routine and there would be points where I'd be like, how can this even be happening to me? But you just keep going. And then one day you wake up and it's over. Yeah. And as you are in a completely different reality and you can keep the jewels of everything you've learned. But the nightmare is over. Yeah, because it's in that fire that you learn so much and that your children learn so much. And although you don't wish it on any child,

28:35life happens, things happen. And as you said, which was amazing that your daughter saw the strength to go, my mom is strong, my mom can change things. So anything that happens in her life, she will have the courage and the resilience to change them. And we don't like to learn it, but that's when the real strong, deep regenerative learning happens in those very tough times. So if you look back at it, what was it, this kind of the real depth under the stone, the belief about yourself, that loud or not loud, everything unfolded on top of?

29:21The negative belief, the weakness that it's there. I'm not good enough, I'm not safe. What was it, do you think I need all of that? Just that I can't survive without this person. I need this person to survive. Absolute survival. And also emotionally, just desperately waiting for this person to love me for who I was. That just wanting to be loved for who I was rather than constantly trying to be enough and never being enough. So you could say the belief that I was never enough as well and I couldn't survive on my own. Do you know the number of women we talk to and who just don't feel that they're enough? And I look at them and they're so amazing, they're so enough.

30:07They're more than enough, they're everything, they're whole, they kind of know. And yet it's so often the belief underneath the stone. And isn't it interesting because the whole thing about survival and I know how it came from my childhood and I believe it's very epigenetic, I believe it probably was coming down through the cellular memories as well. I don't think it just related to my life. My life was simply another performance of this. So I think the thought of not being able to survive means that even in myself I felt I didn't have enough to survive. So I know the way I work nowadays,

30:52I held the frequency of not having enough, not being enough. So of course I was going to create a relationship where he would continue to reflect that that I wasn't enough because we will create a mirror of our deepest wounding. So thank you very much to him. He did that perfectly. And that's why the way I am now, whether it's through my meditation practice or the way I work, I know the only true power we have is the power of our bones and the power of the relationships of the different parts of our body inside us. And that they become the antennas and the transmitters of the very energy

31:38of that we create in the world in our external relationships. I also work with polarities on the continuum, to hold the space I do for others. Of course I had to have that experience so that I can be in a room or be on a Zoom call with anyone saying, I've got you and whatever you think and whatever you're saying, I know it's a story. And I know that when we help you to recalibrate the very core, the very hinges of your being, your story is going to change. Having said that, because the work that I do, I was training in back then. So it wasn't just what my daughter said. I should be clear about this. It wasn't just that. It was that in the background, I was creating the very tools which were going to be the things

32:25that meant there was no way I couldn't leave because it's one thing to stay and not have the tools to leave. It's another thing to stay if actually your level of consciousness has got to a level where even if you don't know it because it hasn't been proved because you haven't put it all together to use it yet, you do actually have the ammunition to go, dare I say it, to war because it was like a war. It was a battle between the old me and the potential of the new me. It was a battle between my external environment and my internal environment matching up. Yeah. And it's like that, the learning that you had started was part of the net. It was part of the fabric of the net that without that

33:10and that's why you can't just blow everything up. There has to be a process because although you don't know how it's going to unfold, you know you've got some things in there but I just wanted to listen to the woman who's listening to this and perhaps is in a situation similar or they've got some feelings or they think this doesn't feel aligned and perhaps she knows something but she's overriding it. What would you like her to see about herself? So firstly, to have the compassion for yourself and to be aware that part of you that can't see to treat her like she is a child, a damaged child,

34:01not to treat her like she should be functioning like a mature woman with your logic. Because these are not, we are an animal. Before we're a human, we're an animal and our bodies are wired with so many unconscious programs. So we have this cognitive dissonance where we may well know something to be true and yet we're watching our behavior. This is what addiction is about as well because ultimately it is addiction. We are addicted to the old program. And we're running the old program. So this woman, whoever you are, if you're listening to this right now,

34:48all I can say is you imagine you've got the latest up raided iPhone but you've still got the software of one of the first ones and you haven't quite got the upgrade. It hasn't been installed. So you would not expect that iPhone to work so the upgrade exists but it's not installed. And it's that installation that is what has to happen. And we all know, don't we? You need the right amount of time. What do they always say? Plug it in. You've got to put it somewhere. You've got to plug it in. You've got to leave it. You've got to let it happen. And then it's got to restart.

35:34It doesn't just happen. And I think if we can look at our bodies and our minds in a more mechanical way or like a car that stops working or it's driving not well, you've got to go and look. It's not just obvious. It's not, oh, just change the way you're steering your car and the car will work. No, it's under the bonnet or it's somewhere and you don't understand those mechanisms and programs. So compassion for the fact that we are trying to use logic to deal with something that is a program that we do not understand. Now you can transform that. I teach that.

36:20I now travel the world teaching biomechanics to change that. I don't talk for talk. I walk for walk. And I teach every single human who gets near me that system. Beautiful. And I will link all your websites, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, how they can get hold of you. And thank you so much for being so honest, raw and telling your story just so beautifully and so many metaphors as well. So many things that people can hold onto the image of the net and your foot that you have with you, one foot in front of the other. Sweats. Sweats always. Yeah.

37:05And just the loving compassion and all those, this wounded little girl who just loved the phone that needed upgrading. So really thank you for your time and thank you for your story of vulnerability and your wisdom and your courage. Thank you, Victoria. Thank you Debbie. Thank you for giving me the time to share a little bit more. Right. Thank you. So as you finish listening today, just notice what stayed with you. Maybe there was a part that felt familiar or something quietly uncomfortable. And that's usually where the truth is sitting. Thanks for listening.