Mental Nesting
Mental Nesting is the gentle space for sensitive adults who've outgrown the "hustle through your healing" mentality. Hosted by licensed therapist and writer Barbara Guimaraes, this podcast explores the messy, nonlinear reality of rebuilding your life after trauma, heartbreak, and the kind of personal upheaval that leaves you questioning everything.
If you're someone who's done therapy, read the books, and tried all the self-help strategies but still feel like you're figuring it out as you go—this podcast is for you. Barbara brings both her clinical expertise and lived experience of navigating bipolar disorder, relationship trauma, coming out later in life, and the quiet courage it takes to choose yourself when no one taught you how.
Each episode feels like a conversation with your most emotionally intelligent friend—the one who sees your sensitivity as a superpower, not a flaw. Through vulnerable storytelling, practical frameworks, and her signature "soft but unfiltered" approach, Barbara helps you reconnect with your inner child, build unshakable self-trust, and create a life that feels authentically yours.
This isn't about optimizing or fixing yourself. It's about learning to be human—messily, beautifully, exactly as you are. Because sometimes the most radical thing you can do is slow down, turn inward, and remember that healing doesn't have to hurt to be real.
Perfect for highly sensitive people, therapy graduates, late bloomers, and anyone who's ever felt "too much" in a world that demands you be less. Welcome to your emotional homecoming.
Mental Nesting
Empathy as Data: From Feeling Everything Twice to Reading the Room
What if the reason empathy hurts so much isn't because you feel too deeply—but because you haven't learned to work with what you're feeling?
In this deeply personal episode, Barbara shares her journey from experiencing empathy as a "double pain" to transforming it into her greatest professional asset. Growing up, understanding why someone hurt her only made the hurt worse—she'd feel her own pain and absorb theirs too, twisting herself into different shapes trying to be worthy of love on their terms.
But when she started her work as a social worker and therapist, something shifted. That same sensitivity that had wounded her in personal relationships became a profound tool for connection and healing.
The difference? Learning to treat emotional responses as data rather than damage to her self-worth.
You'll discover:
- Why understanding someone's "why" used to break her twice—and how that changed
- The critical distinction between being triggered and being attacked
- How to maintain deep empathy while setting protective boundaries
- When understanding someone's pain obligates you to nothing
- Practical tools for reading emotional data without absorbing it as your own
This is for empaths, highly sensitive people, therapists, and anyone who's ever made someone else's reaction mean something about their worth. Because your sensitivity isn't a flaw—it's a sophisticated data collection system that just needs to be calibrated differently.
Perfect for people-pleasers learning to set boundaries, helping professionals navigating their own healing, and anyone tired of feeling everything twice.
Brief mentions of past relationship pain and emotional processing
Thank you for being here, beautiful soul.
If this episode resonated with you, I'd be so grateful if you'd leave a review—it helps other sensitive souls find this gentle space we're creating together.
Connect with me:
- Instagram: @mentalnesting_
- Substack: mentalnesting.substack.com
- Email: hello@mentalnesting.com
Join The Nest
The Nest is my free community where we have conversations like this and you don’t have to explain yourself as much.
Want to work together?
I offer gentle, nervous-system-informed support for therapy-experienced and sensitive adults. Learn more about coaching and community offerings at homecoming.mentalnesting.com.
Remember: Messy healing is still healing. You don't have to be done to be enough.
Mental Nesting Podcast: For sensitive adults who've outgrown the hustle
