Maybe you think it’s just a bad habit. Maybe you think it’s just loving chocolate or it’s how you relax or any other number of things you tell yourself. But what if your cravings hold a deeper message about what season of life you’re in and what your heart is searching for? Artist and author Angie Haskell joins AllMomDoes host Julie Lyles Carr for an eye-opening conversation about the things women are turning to today to try to get their needs met, but how we’re still not getting to the core of who we are and what we need.
 Special thanks to George Fox University for sponsoring the AllMomDoes Podcast!
Show Notes:
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Transcription:
Julie Lyles Carr:
Hey, friend. Quick note here at the top of the episode. I cannot wait for you to hear this conversation. It is with my friend Angie Haskell, and we are going to talk about the things that we crave, how those cravings can get us into trouble, the things that we need to be looking at when it comes to really identifying what needs we have. You’re going to love this conversation and it’s a very real conversation. So we are going to use real words to describe real situations and real temptations that go on. We’re going to talk about some life circumstances that we’re going to just be really honest and vulnerable about. So this might be an opportunity, if you have any concern for little listening ears around you, just go ahead, put those headphones in and I will meet you over at the podcast.
Angie Haskell:
I struggle with things and other mothers are struggling with things and we think because we’re these Christian women that we’re not supposed to have those and we sure shouldn’t talk about. It’s just got to change.
Julie Lyles Carr:
I’m Julie Lyles Carr. This is the AllMomDoes Podcast, part of the Purposely Podcast Network. We are here because we want to come alongside you in all kinds of seasons of life, from raising kids to launching kids, to working through issues in your marriage, to helping and encouraging you in your spiritual walk to addressing concerns you have as you’re building a career. We want to be there for you and we have seven seasons worth of episodes for you to go back and listen to where you’ll probably find somebody talking on something that you are facing in your world today. And that’s part of why I’m so excited today to have Angie Haskell on because she’s going to talk about something that’s pretty tender for a lot of us and I am still not convinced we’re doing a great job knowing how to talk about it in our lives today. So Angie, thanks so much for joining the podcast today.
Angie Haskell:
Hey, Jules, thank you so much. As I’ve told you off the camera, I’m a huge fan of this podcast and you, and so I love hearing the conversations about women. I’m a mom as well, but I’m also a woman and we have to own that as well. So I’m thrilled to be here.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Well, Angie, you have just made my day because as soon as we got into the studio, you have just been so encouraging to me and encouraging about the podcast, so thank you so much. That has just been an added bonus for our time together today.
Angie Haskell:
Mean every word.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Well, I really appreciate it. So Angie, give the listener a little snapshot of where you are in the world. I know you’re in Santa Fe, New Mexico, gorgeous place, but just give the listener a little feel for who you are and what you do and all the stuff.
Angie Haskell:
Well, probably like most of us women, we have gone around upside down in hills and valleys and pits and clawed their way out somehow. I’m sure that the listeners can tell by just hearing me, I am from the south, so I’m from Kentucky, was a high school art teacher and then left teaching because sadly I was spending every penny on art supplies, which we should not have to in this world. Shout out to teachers, I love you and I respect you. I was one for a long time. Then I left Kentucky or not yet, but I became a pharmaceutical rep actually for a big top 10 company, thought I would retire at that, have this dream of my husband and I, like the commercials, we’d retire and go off in an RV and like you see, and everything would be perfect. God had another plan.
I was hit by a semi-truck, literally my world turned upside down, had no idea what I was going to do. Went into deep depression. With God’s grace and some therapy, I decided I was going to be an author, wrote children’s books, my pain disorder, which many women know all about pain we can’t control. Got worse. I was almost ready to lose my limb. It became blue and black, pain off the charts and moved to New Mexico to get out of the humidity. Little did I ever think I’d be divorced at 51, starting over, blindsided financially and emotionally and did not know what I was going to do. And I am 57 now, and smiling and joyful because I held on to Jesus’ garment and with both hands and said, “Man, I’m not letting go and you got to get me through this.” And it’s amazing how life changes for joy when you have that attitude.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Wow, that’s incredible.
Angie Haskell:
Yeah, it was just… But it also, when I was single and alone, sleeping with a cat who I still have and I adore, Mr. Bingley. I love Mr. Bingley. It really made me think about what my needs were and that I wasn’t the most selfish person in the world like people had told me because I had needs I was talking about. It was just, I was brutally honest about it, and I would go on book tours with my children’s books and I would talk to moms, Jules about, you don’t think about writing this book about needs women have, and I would talk a little bit more, and I kid you not, mothers would grab me by the hand and look at me with these pleading eyes and say, “Angie, you got to write this book.”
And then I saw it in their faces that, you know what, I’m not alone here. I struggle with things and other mothers are struggling with things and we think because we’re these Christian women, that we’re not supposed to have those and we sure shouldn’t talk about them. It’s just got to change. And so that’s why Sugarcoated is coming out and I’m so excited.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Well, I’m so thrilled for you and you have had a lot of time in the publishing space, but this is a really unique message that you’ve gotten to bring to us. The book is called Sugarcoated, and what I love about this message is what I see happen and what I definitely experienced a lot when I was in vocational ministry, which is this place that somehow culturally as women, and I’m not talking about just within spiritual communities, but I do think it seems to be a little bit conflated there for sure, is this idea that we shouldn’t have needs as women. We should be taking care of everybody. We should be making sure all the things are getting done. We should be filling all the gaps and we throw out some occasional ideas about self-care.
But here’s what I think you tapped into that is so critical, Angie, when we are not honest about the needs we have and we don’t give voice to those and we don’t lean on others in a sense of community and partnership to help have some of those needs met, what we will tend to do is go find other ways to try to quiet those needs. And sometimes that happens through literally anything that sugarcoated.
Angie Haskell:
Absolutely.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Mine for a long time was peanut M&Ms. I talked about this before in previous episodes on the podcast and when I’ve been guests on other podcasts, I found that for whatever reason, a bag of peanut M&Ms was something I could do for myself in the middle of the day when so much was wild and I was taking care of so many people and doing the thing. And I don’t mean that in any kind of self-pity kind of a way. I didn’t understand why I was so drawn to having my emotional security bag of peanut M&Ms, but it had a whole lot to do with me identifying that as this one treat, this one thing I could do for myself instead of actually getting to the core of what was going on, which was I really needed some quiet. I’m an ambivert, I love people, but man, I leave it all on the floor in taking care of my people.
It doesn’t necessarily energize me. It satisfies me in a certain way, but it doesn’t energize me. And so peanut M&Ms, that was my emotional support animal, if you will, for what I was in the middle of. So Angie, talk to me. You already had this real-time experience when you would talk about seeing a need for this message and women would say, please, yes. Tell the listener about what you now know about the female condition when it comes to having needs, the ways in which we try to get those needs met and the ways in which that can be incredibly detrimental to us because, again, we start with a message of feeling like we shouldn’t have needs. We don’t talk about the actual need. We then try to fill in the gaps with all kinds of stuff, and we end up coming out the other side feeling even more exhausted and more unseen. So talk to me about what you learned in the process of putting together this book, speaking with women, informing yourself on what the landscape is like.
Angie Haskell:
Yeah. And I think you nailed it very well when it comes to the thing you reached for, and unfortunately, in my life, in a lot of women’s lives, and I’m sure yours as well, we also can reach for things that are a lot worse than an M&M. And listen, I’m very brutal honestly in my book. I throw myself under the bus first because I think it’s important. Women, we’re used to, especially for moms, we’re used to putting ourselves last. If we have a need, especially for women of faith, we think, oh, my gosh. I shouldn’t be allowed to even think that. I must be the most horrible person on the planet. And we certainly think, why in the world would God want anything to do with me if I am love to shop, for example? That was me. I felt so insecure growing up that I thought, oh, I’ve got to reach for something that’s going to make me feel better. Isn’t that the core of what we do? We just want to feel better. We don’t think about why we feel that way. We just want to feel better.
I met and interviewed thousands of women when I wrote this book because I knew I wasn’t alone, but I knew we all had different needs. I would meet women that said, “You know what? All my time is tied up with the kids. Now, they’ve grown up, they’ve gone off to college. I kind of feel better about myself sexually. I can’t get pregnant now. I’ve gone through menopause, but my husband is having his own world struggling with maybe it’s sexual dysfunction, maybe he’s just not interested. And then what did I do?” And that’s when I met women who had cravings of watching pornography. They were watching things they shouldn’t on Netflix, and it was a downward spiral. I met women who said, “I just want to feel good again, so I got on an online affair on Facebook.” Those are really tough things to talk about, but it’s very real. I met moms during COVID who said, “I’m now struggling with getting my kids on the computer, not off the computer.”
And now that I’m dealing with that, I just want to go to bed and I have a glass of wine. And then those glasses of wine turned into three or four. That’s a real craving. Cravings are a very real thing that women have to realize, we got to own this. We’re not perfect, but how do we wrestle these things to the ground? Because besides mentally wanting that craving, we got to think this is a real thing. My youngest daughter is a psychologist and she’s a very open book. We’ve talked about it and she said, “Mom, women have to realize this is a very physical thing.” We have dopamine and a neurotransmitter in our brains. When we do something like shopping or someone making us feel good or say something to us to make us feel wonderful, dopamine’s released in our brains, but we can’t tell physically in our mind the difference in if something’s good for us or if something’s bad for us, that dopamine gets released regardless.
And so then you’re having to realize, okay, this is a very physical thing I’m feeling here. This physical high, it’s just like sugar. I mean, we know that sugar is as addictive as cocaine. We know that now. So then you’ve got that. You’ve got a spiritual warfare going on. You combine those things, it’s a force to be reckoned with. That’s why I thought, I’ve got to write about this. So the first half of my book, Sugarcoated, is talking about all these real cravings we have, whether it’s wanting to buy something cool and then figuring out our checkbook’s empty, whether it’s getting so absorbed in these airbrushed women on the internet that we wish we looked like and then we Botox or filler ourselves to death till we don’t even know who we are and what we look like for real.
And look, I’m not knocking Botox. I get Botox. That doesn’t mean we’re bound for hell. It means we kind of don’t want to age or we don’t want to have all the wrinkles we do. It talks about women who are so obsessed with being skinny that not only do they have anorexia, but they have a daughter who watches every move and ends up sick as well. These are real conversations and we got to do something about them because we can’t hide anymore. We just can’t hide anymore. Social media, television, it’s right in our face. So the second half of the book talks about how to get well.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Yeah, we’ve got to take that journey. And, Angie, as you were talking, what it made me reflect on was something that I found to be really challenging. I never wanted… I still don’t want to create a very legalistic culture around a faith community.
Angie Haskell:
Absolutely.
Julie Lyles Carr:
And I think, I don’t know, initial kind of fix that we had for that as some of were trying to work to create communities that weren’t, oh, clutch our pearls and shocked by everything…
Angie Haskell:
Exactly.
Julie Lyles Carr:
… was to, in a weird way, almost make it funny, some of the cravings that we have. One of the things that I found to be very interesting, there’s a psychologist here in town who I just love and he and I would co-teach very frequently, and he and I would go around and around, we’d debate different things and on and on, and he’s just a great personality. Part of what he really grappled with and he was trying to really accommodate for, and he knew I had the research, he knew it was right, but were the number of women, women of faith, who are using pornography.
We were seeing numbers just jump in ways they had never jumped before, which completely messed with a lot of the things we’re told that I personally have never agreed with and certainly did not find to be true in my work with women, which is, well, guys are visual and women aren’t. And I kept going, “I don’t know which women you’re talking to, but I know a whole lot of women who are very visual and here are the numbers that back up some of the challenge with that.” My whole point in all of this, Angie, is that what I found is that we almost began to have a little bit of a wink-wink at some stuff that, true before we were probably overreacting to, but then I began to see that sort of this wine mom culture was becoming something of a joke.
I mean, really and what we were talking about was women over consuming and yet making it sort of, well, you’re a mom, you need to let down, you need this, you need… I saw different conversations and ideas around people being too uptight about certain types of entertainment or trying to call everything pornography or whatever. And again, I don’t want to be in that place where we are so legalistic about things because that’s its own form of dishonesty in a sense, to ignore what people are looking for or craving or the ability to have real conversations about real feelings.
The other thing that I became increasingly concerned about was that we were making a lot of things, which in moderation or with thoughtfulness, might be okay on occasion. We were taking that and we were almost giving permission to go way too far in the effort to not be legalistic. So let’s talk for a minute about some of the stats that we’re seeing. I know that with pornography rates among women, we’re seeing an unbelievable increase. And again, one thing I want to state here, we’re not just talking about maybe that show on Netflix that’s a little blue. We’re talking about true seeking it out, identified as such online networks and that kind of thing. We’re seeing these numbers skyrocket. We’re seeing a number of women who are dealing with eating disorders of all stripes and varieties, including women of faith.
Another thing that’s interesting to me about your story is given that you were working for a pharmaceutical giant and then you went through this devastating accident and the result of the injuries you received at that was the number of women I was seen on prescription medication being prescribed by a doc. They were not illegally going and seeking these drugs, but clearly it was causing a lot of mess in their lives even when those prescriptions had come from very valid needs. So paint a picture about what you are beginning to find about women, women of faith, and all of the sugar-coated portals that they are encountering that lead to addictive behaviors, lead to the suppression of what the real need is. What did you find?
Angie Haskell:
And the way you described that is so accurate because I found the very same thing and it was one of the reasons the more I talked with women, the more it made me want to write this book because I’m like, there’s clearly a disconnect here.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right. Right. Disconnect is a great word, Angie. Yeah, that’s great.
Angie Haskell:
I’m like, this makes absolutely zero sense. There’s one of my favorite songs to those women that listen to any kind of country music. It’s by a group called Little Big Town and they have a song out called Sugarcoat. First time I heard the song, I had to pull off the road and cry because I thought, isn’t that what we women do, especially not to knock people from the south, but many of us, we want to put this sugarcoat on with our pearls like you said, and we want to look like everything’s just great. Little do they know the warfare that we’ve got going on. My pastor says something I think about all the time is that when you point a finger at someone, you better remember that three of those fingers are also pointing back at you. And sadly, I think we are in a culture right now that so many love shaming and pointing the finger at everybody else of how bad they are or how unchristian they are, but yet they don’t want anyone else to know what’s going on under their own roof.
And that for me is infuriating. We cannot point fingers. We’ve got to lift women up. Do we need to have some conversations with women to say, I love you, but I think you’re going down a road that could be really dangerous? I think that’s an obligation we women should have. Not to point fingers but to have a conversation, if we have someone in our, I call it our sister circle to say, have you ever thought maybe you’re drinking a little bit too much or I’m worried about you. We need to have those conversations instead of being a gossip fest. Another thing my pastor says is, if you’re going to fast and gossip, then go ahead and eat.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Yeah, that’s great.
Angie Haskell:
And I think that’s so true and we need to have those real discussions. Like you mentioned, in the Christian community, even though we don’t want to admit this, the viewing a pornography is equal to someone who is not of faith. That’s men and women. Affairs and divorce, through the ceiling for Christian people, and of course, it goes up as you get older because kids grow up, the elephant’s in the room and nobody wants to talk about it. I talked with women that were 35 who were in the midst of trying to raise kids and find out their husband has a pornography addiction, but they don’t want to talk about it. Or the mother has a pornography addiction and you think you can just pray their way out of it. I’m not knocking prayer. Prayer is important, but we also have to own when we’ve got these addictions, or I call them cravings. A craving is before they become addictions, one more reason I wrote this book.
We got to stop it in our tracks, pray about it and admit, I am not weak just because I need to see a therapist, or these people that say, “Oh, do you know she’s…. I heard she does cocaine or I heard she drinks whiskey all the time.” Don’t be judging someone when just because you take a Xanax, and you’re taking a Xanax and yet you’re condemning someone else. Prescription pills are a huge problem, and so you can’t box these things in your own box and not think it’s a craving or an addiction. They all are things we struggle with. They’re all things we can get help with, but we are living in a fancy world if we think just because we’re a Christian that that makes it okay. It just doesn’t.
Julie Lyles Carr:
It is probably one of the number one questions I get being a mom of eight kids. And that question is, what on earth are y’all doing about college? And I can tell you, with eight different kids, eight different learning styles, eight different ideas about what the kids want when it comes to their careers and all of the rest, college has been a big topic of conversation around here. Well, there is a university that I want you to know about because it just hits so many of the things that are really important when it comes to considering your kids’ college education. George Fox University, it’s the number one private school in Oregon. It’s a Christian university. It’s located in the heart of the Pacific Northwest, and what’s so great is in addition to a top-notch education, students have the opportunity to grow and deepen their faith and they can learn in this really pivotal time in their lives who God made them to be.
I mean, let’s face it, we need more people coming out of our universities who know how to be leaders and how to be leaders with character. And George Fox University offers more than 60 academic majors, and that includes a nationally recognized engineering program, a nursing program. It allows your student to pursue their passions and prepare for the calling that God has for them. And let’s not forget about fun when it comes to college. George Fox University students have a great student life. There are weekly campus events. There’s chapel. There’s service opportunities. There are 23 NCAA Division III athletic teams. Here’s something that is important to me. There’s a study abroad opportunity, so if your student wants to go and experience life somewhere else for a semester, they can do that. There’s outdoor recreation because, of course, we’re talking about Oregon, so gorgeous. George Fox University could be just the perfect fit for your student as you are looking into college career and all that goes beyond. George Fox University, where your student will learn and thrive in the center of it all.
I love that you have this distinction about the craving stage. I think this is really important. It seems like we’ve built a structure in the way that we talk about these things that you either have no problem or you’re an addict, and that danger zone in between is where I think we could really be helping each other better.
Angie Haskell:
Totally.
Julie Lyles Carr:
But we don’t tend to build… In our desire to not be judgy and legalistic, like I was talking before, we don’t tend to build communities in which there is room for real conversation.
Angie Haskell:
Exactly.
Julie Lyles Carr:
And if you have real conversation, often you’re going to be accused of being judgy. So we have some configuring we need to do within our communities of faith to understand how to have these harder conversations with a lot of safety, a lot of compassion, a lot of transparency about our own issues and cravings and things that we do, and somehow we’ve also embedded in all of this, well, yeah, these three, four things are really bad, but these three or four things are not quite as bad even though they’re still in this craving scale, even though it’s the thing that we think we have to have to help us get to the other side of something that’s challenging. So I love that you identify this craving stages where we need to start paying attention.
Now, let me ask you this. At the base of all of this, we’re talking about the fact that we have needs, they are needs that are not being met and they may not even be understood to be needs by us. How do we go about it? It seems to me one of the first places we have to go is understanding how do we identify what the actual need is, because I think a lot of times we jump to the symptom. I mean, for example, me with my bag of peanut M&Ms, I just knew I needed that bag of peanut M&Ms. I hadn’t really done some soul work to figure out, wow, why is it that I’m almost a little bit weird about having to have this bag of peanut M&Ms? So how do we go about the process without a lot of self-condemnation, but with a great deal of honesty to understand what the need is that we’re even trying to address?
Angie Haskell:
One thing that I will say has helped me so much, before I saw myself… Let’s say, I was shopping too much or I was thinking about things too much about… I was condemned quite a bit for having a need of, I’ll give an example, wanting sexual intimacy. There were issues going on and I don’t want to degrade anyone, but I had to figure out, okay, is it all just me? Is all this me just doing all this or is there something else at play here? And I had two best friends that I would go down fighting for any day of the week. We women have to have a sister circle.
I think we got to have women in our life that we can trust, even if it’s something that you say, you know what? I’m going to take you to the grave. I’m going to help you with it, but this is us talking here. You’re safe here. We women have a lot of friends that we can go to dinner with. We can have play dates with with our kids. I’m not knocking those people. I have those in my life and I love them so much, but you’ve got to have some women, man, you can talk to who’ll say, Angie, Jules, you need to talk to a pastor about this. Or I think there’s… You might need to… Maybe you need counseling. Let’s pray about this together. That’s got to be the first step. My book talks about different prayers based on different cravings. There’s prayers to pray to God about when it comes to pornography or wanting to feel intimacy, wanting to feel loved. A lot of this goes back to insecurity. We may feel insecure about our bodies, about…
There’s nothing wrong with women wanting to feel desirable. That’s totally okay. If you’ve been told in your life, oh, well, all you worry about is how you look and have you ever thought maybe it’s because you feel insecure? Maybe that’s the thought. You need to be having a conversation with a therapist who can work through that with you. I had someone once tell me in my family that you’re weak if you have to go to therapy. You just must be a weak individual. And I believed that for a long time. That’s so cruel. That’s just cruel. We have to be real with who we are.
I have women friends that say, oh, I’ve got a best friend. It’s my husband. Well, your husband doesn’t hormonal like we are. They don’t go through menopause. They don’t understand what women, all the time, need. And so I think finding some really close friends, maybe it’s just one, but find someone you can trust, not your kids. Your kids don’t need to be burdened with what you’re going on with.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Oh, preach. Preach.
Angie Haskell:
No, you just don’t. And of course I know there’s women who say, my daughter’s my best friend. Okay, that’s cool. I don’t want to be my daughter’s best friend. I want to be their mother. That’s something totally different. My job is to be their mom. They need best friends that they can talk with, and that’s a big soapbox for me. But we need women who are our age that feel it, that understand, that don’t judge. We’ve got enough judging going on in this country right now and this political mess that it makes me ill. We’ve got to stop that and start having loving conversations and being willing to step out and say, I got you. I’m not here to condemn you. I’m going to love you. I’m going to help you get a resource that’s going to help you get it together. Boy, we need that right now.
Julie Lyles Carr:
We really do. And to have women that we can process with. I have been realizing in my own life, and I think particularly oldest and only daughter, I got that going on. Then I pastored for years. I got that going on. Then I got a psych degree. I got that going on. Angie, my desire to get someone to solution really fast is a major heartbeat, and yet I’m realizing in my own life how important it is to just have processing conversations.
Angie Haskell:
Exactly.
Julie Lyles Carr:
And how much better it is in many ways when someone can arrive at their own revelation simply because you were someone who was there and said, tell me about what’s going on. You don’t have to have all the answers. You don’t have to have the interpretation. But what is really powerful that I think we’re missing a lot of times right now in our faith communities is simply allowing someone to think through and get to the bottom of why they’re doing what they’re doing. To your point, for example, it’s not as simple as, oh, I have this friend and she started watching porn and the porn was addictive and now she’s down the lane.
It’s well, what was going on for her in her life when it came to her most intimate relationship with her spouse when it came to maybe something that had been unrealized in her life? What brought her to that place? Because until we deal with the core of what’s going on in some of these issues, we have some great band-aids, and we have some things that can be helpful, but we’re not going to get to that place of deepest healing. That’s what I hope with a message like yours, with a ministry like yours, women are able to hear is that getting to the core of what’s going on is going to be so important in the moving forward. What do you think women need to be on the lookout for? Let me give a couple of different sort of generational slips and you tell me what you saw in your research.
Angie Haskell:
Okay.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Did you find a difference and what would those be, in what women who were in the most active stages of mothering? So I’m talking like the toddlers to the early junior high kids, and I realize there is still hardcore parenting that goes on when your kids are high school and above, but I’m just talking the physical load of caring for smaller kids. Did you find that those women tended to have some different cravings or expressions of unmet needs versus, say, women who were getting kids launched, were dealing with perimenopause, were dealing with some big life changes in terms of their day-to-day life? What did you find between those two populations?
Angie Haskell:
The cravings are, well, not totally, but very, very different.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Interesting. Okay.
Angie Haskell:
Yeah. When I would talk with women in their late 20s, early 30s, they wanted peace. They wanted peace. They were trying to figure out, how can I do all this stuff? I’ve been there. I mean most… It’s a two income homes these days, and they would crave peace. Sometimes the mothers I would talk to that had kids, early elementary schools, they also got… their craving kind of morphed because they were worrying about their bodies. They were worrying, they were missing out on something if they saw people who didn’t have children. They see that more. More and more women, a lot of women don’t want kids. They would get really into TikTok and get so wrapped into that and sometimes very much addicted to TikTok, to the point they were forgetting taking care or focusing on the needs of their children. But then they wanted to look skinny.
When you get watching some of these shows of very wealthy families who had these children who have everything, then they started thinking, oh, I crave this. I want my kids to have… Why don’t my kids have a fancy car to ride in on the way to school? You can watch social media, that age group of women to the point, man, it can drive you to the point you’re questioning your existence. You’re questioning your marriage. You’re questioning what your husband looks like, what you look like, what your kids should have, what brands they should have, and to deal with that, more drinking, more wine, prescription pills, depression. Talked to a lot of women that were so depressed because they didn’t have the life they were seeing on TV.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Presented. Yeah. Yeah.
Angie Haskell:
Heartbreaking. Then I would see women who had raised their children, kids had left the nest like I mentioned before. And then you’ve got two people who sometimes had become strangers and you don’t know what to do. There’s a very good reason divorces after 50 go through the ceiling.
Julie Lyles Carr:
They have climbed. The stats are wild. It’s wild. Yeah.
Angie Haskell:
It’s amazing. And I was one of those statistics and I was in such a state of depression, I contemplated killing myself because I had been repeatedly told, you are selfish for having to want intimacy as much as you do. Well, women and men go through a lot different processes when we’re in our 50s. One wants one thing, one wants another thing, and it’s like, but nobody wanted to talk about it.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Right. Right.
Angie Haskell:
They don’t want to talk. And here’s the thing I found talking to a lot of women, even in their 40s and 50s and even into the 60s, is we’re just friends. We just want to be friends. I don’t know a woman who doesn’t want intimacy. I just don’t. My husband read this book as I was writing it, and he would come in, he would sit outside out here in Santa Fe on our patio, and I said, “Bill, you don’t have to read this book.” Well, of course he wanted to read it. He said, “Angie, this is important to you. It’s important to me.” And he would come in after every chapter and he would say, “Men need to read this book. You’re not just promoting this for women, right?” And I was like, “Why?” And he said, “Angie, it helps me understand you. It helps me understand what women…”
He said, “I’m going to throw myself under the bus here, Angie. Men aren’t the brightest people in the world all the time. We don’t know what you want. You got to tell us, even though you think we should be able to read your mind with what you’re struggling with or what you’re wanting, girl, we got to be told. You just got to tell us.” And of course, I would meet women when I would have a conversation and say, “Have you ever thought about telling them what you want?” And here was the reply I heard a zillion times. “I already know what you want. I already know.” No, you don’t.
Julie Lyles Carr:
No, you got to ask. You got to ask. Yeah.
Angie Haskell:
[inaudible 00:38:21] you do. And I say that with all the love in the world, but women don’t know everything either. Give your partner the benefit of the doubt to say, what is it you need? Women that I would talk to that I suggested that with, I would get messages from them on Facebook or text and they would say, “Oh, my goodness, you’re right. I missed it. I totally missed it.” And that’s tragic. So it goes back to conversations. But our needs change as we get older. Mine did. I’m sure yours did as well. So many times when my kids were five years old or six and I just wanted to get them in the bed, make sure they were fed, and I would literally collapse in the bed with my suit on and heels, thinking, God, just let me live one more day. [inaudible 00:39:14] just live one more day. And I just crave that. But, man, those things change and we got to wrestle them to the ground.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Yeah. And stay aware of those changes. Be checked in enough with ourselves to understand that things are going to change. That just because something used to meet a need that we had at one time does not mean that’s going to continue to be the thing that meets that need.
Well, Angie, I just am so thankful that you have tackled this topic. Everything from the brain chemistry of why we sometimes crave even in food substances, the things that we do, what our brain is looking for, all the way to those emotional needs and how our relationship needs can have a shift. Just being aware of all those things. What an incredible conversation.
So Angie, tell the listener where they can go and find your book, Sugarcoated: Finding Sweet Release from Cravings that Control Us. Where can they find the book? Where can they find more of you and have more of this wisdom and this look back at the things you’ve been learning. Where should the listener go?
Angie Haskell:
Well, thank you so much for having me to talk about this. As you can tell, I’m very passionate about it.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Love it. Love it.
Angie Haskell:
Yeah. I don’t want to see… I’ve got two grown daughters, so I don’t want to see us passing down these problems to our own children. They’re watching every move we make. Let’s be honest, they do, good and bad. So that’s another reason I wrote Sugarcoated is for the future of young women, but they can go to angiehaskell.com and find out where to buy Sugarcoated. Of course, it’s on Amazon, christianbook.com. Whitaker House is my publisher, so I was excited to team up with them. And I also have a blog on the website. I was also a painter, so I have my paintings in several galleries throughout the Southwest. They can find out more about that also. And follow me on Instagram or Facebook at Author Angie Haskell.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Perfect.
Angie Haskell:
I love meeting women. I love chatting with women, texting, messaging. It’s my passion so that we all can get healthy and feel great about ourselves. I think the older we get, it should be more exciting, not fearful. God taught me through a lot of hills and valleys that I’m not done with you. If you’re still on this earth, there’s a reason for it, and I want to leave it all on the table and use every gift I have to help other women. It’s so important.
Julie Lyles Carr:
I love that. Well, Angie, thank you for that. Listener, I want you to go check out all the good stuff that Angie has. I can’t wait to go check out your paintings. I’m excited to see that.
Angie Haskell:
Thank you.
Julie Lyles Carr:
And again, thank you so much for your time and for this important message for the heart and all of the effort that you put into gathering this research and really giving us a great snapshot of where women are today, the things that could be tripping us up and the path forward to trying to find and really looking for, within God’s love for us, true fulfillment, truly finding the things that we crave and the needs we have. Angie, thank you so much.
Angie Haskell:
Thank you, Jules. Thanks so much.
Julie Lyles Carr:
All right, listeners, so go check it out. Rebecca puts together show notes each and every week. You’re going to find a transcript of the podcast. If you want to go back and read something and look at that, you’ll find all the links that we talked about. Also, make sure that you are part of the AllMomDoes community. You can find us at allmomdoes.com, AllMomDoes on the socials. All kinds of women there, great resources for you. As we always talk about, from the kids you’re raising and the romance you’re building, and the career you’re chasing, and the spiritual life that you’re continuing to grow in, you’re going to find great encouragement and community there.
I love to connect with you too usually on Instagram, Julie Lyles Carr, all the places you can check it out, and I’ll see you next time on the AllMomDoes podcast.
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