Ambitious women spend their days in high-functioning mode: leading, deciding, solving, holding the emotional tone of teams and households alike. Then they walk through the front door with no transition point at all, and the wheels fall off over a home reader or a missing library book. Kristy calls it identity whiplash, and when she shared the term online, her DMs filled with women saying the same thing: this is exactly how I feel.

In this guest episode, Kristy is joined by Dr Vanessa Lapointe, a registered psychologist who practised for nearly 20 years, founder of The North Star Developmental Clinic, bestselling author and international speaker. Vanessa is known globally for her compassionate, science-backed approach to helping parents and other big people become the calm, grounded presence their children borrow regulation from.

Together they explore why our overreactions are age regressions rather than character flaws, how girls are programmed early to equate keeping others happy with staying safe, what Harvard researcher Edward Tronick’s work on rupture and repair means for imperfect days, and the practical protocols that let you show up as the big person without abandoning yourself: manufactured transition points, atonement over apology, and a morning ritual for collecting all the parts of yourself before the day begins.

This conversation is warm, funny and disarmingly honest. It is for every woman who has ever wondered why she can run a boardroom all day and then lose it in her own kitchen at 5:47pm. The answer is not more willpower. It is biology, programming and repair.