Grief is not just born from death. Sometimes, it may also emerge from loss of identity because of childhood trauma, loss of trust because of betrayals, and loss of self-awareness because of toxic relationships. Irene Weinberg is joined by Riana Malia, a master coach trained in trauma-conscious modalities, who shares how she transformed her grief into a framework for healing and found her purpose helping women release what’s been holding them back, to step into extraordinary love. Riana also talks about what it took to reclaim her self-worth from her own fair share of heartbreak and reinvention, turn the most painful chapter of her life into valuable learning experiences, and clear bitter patterns rooted in grief.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- Why loving again is difficult if you are still attracted to the same people who hurt you
- The patterns or identities Riana was carrying that kept her stuck in cycles of pain
- Why grief doesn’t just come from death, but also from the loss of identity, trust, or the future we thought we’d have
- The devastating betrayal by her father that pulled Riana into a criminal investigation
- How Riana found the love of her life
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS RIANA:
- Why did you feel the need to spend your early years trying to prove your worth through performance?
- How did you rebuild your life from the ground up?
- What lessons or gifts has grief brought you that are essential to the work you do today?
- How do you help high-achieving women to finally release what’s been holding them back to step into extraordinary love?
- What are some of the ways women can honor their grief without being defined by it?
Discover What’s Really Shaping Your Love, Identity & Self-Worth 💫
If you’ve ever wondered what’s really shaping your patterns in love, identity, and self-worth 💭, Riana invites you to explore her Extraordinary Love Index™ (ELI™)—a powerful 40-question diagnostic quiz that uncovers the hidden dynamics beneath how you connect, choose, and show up in relationships ❤️🔥. You’ll receive a personalized 28-page report designed to help you see what’s been holding you back—and the clear first steps toward shifting it 🌱✨.
Take the quiz here 👉 https://quiz.rianamalia.com/
GRIEF AND REBIRTH LINKS
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📚 ‘Good to the Last Drop! Embracing Your Life’s Third Chapter’
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I Went Through Childhood Trauma, Toxic Relationships & Family Betrayal, Here’s How I Finally Healed
I hope this message finds each of you so very well. I could not be more delighted to welcome Riana Malia, who is an Identity Architect for High Achieving Women, a Board-Certified Neuro-Somatic Practitioner, and the Creator of the Clear to Create method. Riana helps women who appear to have it all, the career, the family, the friendships, the lifestyle, yet still find themselves repeating painful relationship patterns or feeling disconnected from the love they deeply deserve.
Through her powerful blend of neuro-somatic practices, NLP, and quantum time release, Riana guides women to clear their subconscious and somatic imprints of grief, betrayal, and self-sabotage that quietly shape their choices. Her work reveals a profound truth. Grief isn’t only born from death. It can emerge from the loss of identity, the loss of trust, or the loss of the future we thought we’d have. These invisible forms of grief live in the body, influencing how we show up in love, in work, and in life.
Riana’s calling was forged through her own seasons of heartbreak and reinvention. Single motherhood, betrayal, and the collapse of the life she once imagined. In healing herself, she discovered that releasing the emotional residue of these losses creates space for something extraordinary. Rebirth. Now, she helps women reclaim their self-worth, step out of survival mode, and finally create lives and loves that feel like home. I’m looking forward to talking with Riana, who’s joining us from San Rafael, California, about the traumatic betrayal she experienced.
Why grief doesn’t just come from death, how our most painful chapters can become the foundation of extraordinary new lives, the lessons and gifts grief has brought Riana, and much more, for a conversation that will surely explore how clearing patterns rooted in grief can open the door to a profound transformation, extraordinary love, and the freedom to become who you were always meant to be.
Riana, a warm, heartfelt welcome to the show.
Thank you. Happy to be here.
How Riana Experienced Family Betrayal And Childhood Trauma
This is going to be a wonderful conversation. I know it. Riana is just so charming and has so much to help you with and she’s got such a happy ending, so you’re going to really want to enjoy this interview. Let’s begin with Riana’s early days. Why did you feel the need to spend your early years trying to prove your worth through performance? I can relate to that. When your father promised to pay your college expenses but failed to follow through, in what ways did you quickly pivot?
My parents met in Maui, Hawaii and married and had me, and quickly got divorced. My mom and I went to Minnesota, where she was from, he went to California. She worked so hard and she was an amazing mama and I was so blessed to have my grandparents, which were the anchor of my life. I got to grow up really every summer and every break in a tiny little town in Southern Minnesota called Blooming Prairie, population of like 2,500 people, and I got to grow up in a horse farm. Those lessons and that just that safety and that solid incredible love really shaped a lot of who I am.
However, there was always that sense of wanting that relationship and my father had remarried and had another family and was very much in and out in a sense, but didn’t wasn’t really present and it was a lot of big talking, no real action. When I was going off to college, as you mentioned, he had said, “I never helped you, I never really helped your mom, I’m going to take care of your room and board for freshman year,” I was like, “That’s really amazing, thank you.” I go off to school, I’m doing the eighteen-year-old freshman dorm living and a couple months in I get a call from housing and they said, “Your bill was never paid and you are fully maxed on loans. You either have to pay the bill or you have to leave.”
I was eighteen and my mom had just moved to another country. I didn’t have what I felt like was a lot of options, but I did have options, we always do. It was either I could leave school and go figure something else out or I could stay and figure something out. I left the dorm, I got 3 jobs, I rented a 5-bedroom house, I sublet the other 4 bedrooms, and I did my thing. It wasn’t a very fun college experience, which I’m so happy my baby girl is graduating from college, I don’t know how that happened.
Congratulations.
Thank you. I think in that moment, it was the first time that I could go back and pinpoint something that I couldn’t have articulated then. When we are in situations where a boulder gets dropped and we have absolutely no idea how to get to the other side of that, we often times feel frozen in that we don’t have the resources to do it the money, the support, the energy, the time, whatever it is. Really, it’s about tapping into that part of us that’s resourceful. It’s about the resourcefulness, not the resources themselves.
When we get into a difficult situation, we have to tap into our resourcefulness, not the resources themselves. Share on X
Did you know that you had that part of yourself before you tapped into it?
If I look at my life and we can go back to, “Here’s why you do these things,” doesn’t matter. I’m very resourceful. I’m very much if somebody says, “We probably can’t do that now,” I’m like, “I will figure out a way.” That’s part of my survival, right, that was part of my personality.
You were blessed with that part of your personality.
I was blessed with that for sure. There was also a moment of just that sadness, that aloneness of like, “Who does that? Why even bring it up if you’re not going to actually do it?” Now I’m in this position that is hard, it’s embarrassing, it’s all the things. Fast forward a few years and I got married at the ripe old age of 23 and I don’t recommend that.
I love that you said that you got married out of the fear you might never be loved. I think a lot of women do that.
I was certain I was going to be the like old spinster cat lady, so like this was it, and it had to happen and it had to be and to the point where we got engaged and he actually broke off the engagement. I’m very persistent. In my past life, when I decided something was going that it needed, I was so attached to the outcome that I did whatever I needed to make that outcome happen. We got married way too young. You don’t know who you are and you don’t know who you’re with. You’re babies and then you add in all of your own stuff, my baggage, my trauma, my insecurities, and then all of his, and then what you have is a very lonely marriage for nine years.
First of all, your experience with men. Look at how your father betrayed you, what he had done to you, and based on that loving relationship now you pick this guy.
They say you marry your father, which is so interesting because I thought there was no correlation until much later and my ex-husband’s behavior was exactly like my father. He just went family to family to family. It was so incredibly fascinating to me. Inside of that lonely marriage where I was always trying to figure out what was wrong with me and how I could fix it and, “Why don’t you love me and why aren’t you attracted to me,” all the things. Out of that, we had our miracle child. When I say miracle child, Maddie was a miracle child.
We literally had sex one time randomly and I got pregnant and I had a miscarriage. We weren’t together like two more years. One time, I got pregnant with Maddie and we weren’t together ever again but my pregnancy, she was born November 30th, she was due Christmas Eve. She was three and a half weeks early and the night before she was born, I was the maid of honor in my best girlfriend’s wedding. When Maddie was born, she came early, I ended up having emergency surgery, found out I had half of a size of a uterus, she was breached, her cord was wrapped around her neck, like all the things.
Nothing is easy for you, I get this feeling.
My beautiful baby girl was born, perfect health, no NICU stay, thank God. Off we go into this family that we created and again there was a lot of stuff always. When she was six, we finally decided, “This is not something that makes sense anymore.” It was sad, but it also felt pretty calm. We had an agreement. We didn’t need attorneys, we went to mediation on a Friday. We had a conversation. I think there was part of me in that I’ll never forget. I felt a sadness because I was like, “Why couldn’t we be different? Why couldn’t this be different?”
He’d asked me when the time came if we could take her to Disney World for the first time together and I was like, “Absolutely. We can do her birthdays,” like it doesn’t need to be crazy. “We are still her mommy and daddy. My only request is if you meet somebody, if you’re dating, if you’re in a relationship, like, give Maddie this first year, she’s six years old. Just let her have you when she’s with you, and after that period of time, then we can ease her into if there’s other people around.” He said. “No problem.” The very next day, I called to check on her because she had a little cold and she was with her dad, and she said “Daddy’s friend and her daughter are here and we’re making coloring Easter eggs.” I lost my mind.
Betrayal number 800. When you add that to all your father did and now you’ve got the same thing.
Right, same thing. It got crazy and horrible and these next two years were really just awful in every way you could ever imagine.
How To Get To A Place Of Healing
What did you do? You must have been grieving? I know right away you started to try to heal in a certain way, so I know that there are some modalities you employed because look what’s going on with you here. This was a blessing in a way because some of what you learned has shaped your coaching methodology. What did you do to arrive to that place?
Yeah, when you’re in that place, we all do the things we’re told to do. We talk about it in therapy. We talk about it with our girlfriends. We read books. We do the meditations. We do all the things and don’t get me wrong, it’s all beneficial. It all has its place. At a certain point, when you continue to stay in the story, that’s what defines you. Your identity becomes that and you are just in it. You’re in the story, there’s absolutely no way to really move forward but when you just keep retelling the story and reinstalling all the trauma and all the betrayal and all the drama and all the pain.
Childhood Trauma: At a certain point, when you continue to stay in the story, that’s what defines you. There’s absolutely no way to move forward when you just keep reinstalling all the trauma, betrayal, drama, and pain.
In the midst of all of that too, there was a lot of shame for me because he left, whatever, wasn’t paying the mortgage. I didn’t have a job at the time. I was selling things out of the house and then I was arrested, if you will. They didn’t come and get me, but I had to go to the police station and I had to go to court and I had to be because they said that I was illegally selling things that now belonged to the bank. It was in the newspaper. I was so filled with shame and fear, I didn’t tell anybody.
How’d you sleep at night?
I didn’t. I was nauseous. I’d take Maddie to school, her little Montessori school, and I would come home before I was had to be at work. My nervous system was so fried for two years. At this time, we lived in Aspen on this little farm cottage and we had horses and chickens and our neighbors had horses, so we shared water and whatever.
Thankfully, this wonderful man, we call him the chicken man, he happened to be attorney and when Kathy, my neighbor and I were on a horseback ride down our road one day and I finally told her because I hadn’t told this to anyone, because I was so scared and I was so embarrassed. She said, “We’ve got to talk to Bob. He’ll help you.” This man who didn’t know me from anybody, at no cost, helped me get through that process so that ultimately nothing was ever convicted. They threw it out.
You didn’t get a record?
Funny story, when I went to do redo my Global Entry a few years ago, they asked me if I had ever been arrested. I’m like, “No.” They’re like, “Are you sure?” I’m like, “Yeah.” They’re like, “What about in Washington?” I completely forgot. It did exist in the ether somewhere. With all of this going on, doing the therapy, doing the things, and just feeling like I was just so stuck.
Now the therapy you talked about, though, was with a grief coach or something?
No, it was with a therapist, like a traditional therapist, where we’re talking through things and, “Let’s talk about this, let’s go back to your childhood, let’s unpack this.”
You’re regurgitating it a lot.
Over and over, and then you go and you do your thing and then you come back next week and, “Okay, now let’s talk about this again.” It was just like without having any other options, you’re trying to do the thing that you know to do to get healthy and heal and do all the things. Three years after the divorce, so Maddie’s nine, my father came to visit.
When you do not have options anymore, you will try to do things that will make you healthy. Share on X
Just what you needed.
Yeah, I know. He’d been in and out a lot more, and of course after she was born, he wanted to be a part of her life. With him, everything is the next big deal. “This is going to be the thing, it’s going to take care of our whole family.” He has incredible design eye for beauty, he’s a chef, he creates beautiful things. He’s super charming and he’s also a full-blown narcissist, so everything’s about him. It was April, it had just snowed like seventeen inches. The rest of the country was like starting to be in spring.
It had been so cold, like 40 below zero, that the water, the metal pump snapped off. For the rest of the winter from like February on, I had to run a hose into the house and connect it to the washing machine to water the horses and then snake it out. I’m an island girl. I am not built for 40 degrees below zero. When he came, he said, “I think it’s the perfect time for you to move to California. Come take over this business that I’ve built.” At the time, I said, “I’m not moving anywhere for one of your next big deals and I’m not leaving the horses.”
My mom, who did nails for a living for her entire life, had had a surgery on two vertebrae in her neck. They nicked a nerve and she couldn’t at that time move her right arm. You can’t do nails with one hand. I said, “I’m not leaving my mom.” He’s like, “Great, bring the horses, we’ll build a barn, bring your mom, we’ll take care of her too, this will be amazing. Maddie can grow up in this beautiful little town just North of the Golden Gate Bridge. She can be at the ocean. It’s going to be fabulous. Here’s the financials, you can see that there’s money.” Against everything in my body that said, “Don’t do this.”
He has a history and you hadn’t learned yet and healed enough to say, “He showed me who he was and now I’m not believing that and I’m going in spite of that.
It’s because I want that. I want the fairy tale that he has painted.
It also probably contributed to your fantasy of having your father.
A thousand percent. It was like could this be any better? Leaving the winter and not having to be running on college practices and it sounded amazing. My best friends, who were my chosen family, in tears, begged me not to do this. I did it. I packed up my mom and my baby and horse guy came and took the horses and we took the cats and we drove across country. The first couple of months, it was a fairy tale. It was so wonderful and so magical and weekends with the horses up at the farm and my parents hanging out, we’re having family dinners and Maddie getting to experience this whole different part of life and it just felt like, “Okay, I made a good decision.”
I had said, “I’m only going to disrupt Maddie’s life once.” I moved around a lot when I was little. It’s obviously very difficult to feel settled as a child when you don’t have that sense of just grounded safety where you aren’t worrying about anything. I put my faith and hope and trust into that this was real. We were here for a few months and it felt really good and then all of a sudden, she turned 9 or 10, whatever her birthday was on November 30. We had lovely party in the studio for her and all of her new little friends came. The next day, my father was leaving and he had this girlfriend and her obnoxious kids and he was driving them back to South Dakota or North Dakota or wherever they were from.
I was in the studio, Maddie was at school, and I heard some noise. I looked around the corner because it was odd that it said sounded like more than one person coming in. All of a sudden, I see I don’t remember how many people, 8, 9, I don’t know, all these people coming in, guns drawn, pointed at me. They put me in handcuffs. They sat me on a chair. My first thought was, “Maddie’s going to be home from school in like twenty minutes with my mom and a new friend for the first time coming for a play date. I have to call them tell them to go somewhere else.” “You’re not calling anybody.”
We go through this whole thing. Without spending the next hour all the details, I found myself in the middle of this DEA investigation. They had been investigating for quite a long time and they’d been following me and they’d been taking pictures and going through garbage and all of this crazy stuff. Ultimately, they said, “We don’t really think that you had any knowledge or really any part of this, but you could lose Maddie and you could go to jail.” It’s the worst thing you could ever say to a mama. Now I’m in California. I have told the world like, “This was the right decision, we’re happy.”
Explain to people, please tell them what was the criminal investigation about?
DEA, drug enforcement.
Some people may not know that so I want them to know what they suspected your father of.
Yeah, of this whole situation going on where there were drugs being shipped in candles. The whole reason that at that moment they came in because they had been planning this for so long and they had coordinated with my FedEx driver, as soon as he picked up my boxes for that day, to stop up the hill and they would meet him and they would pull off whatever he gave them.
I don’t know if you remember, a million years ago, when Delta Airlines had SkyMall magazine before everything was online. I was so excited because I got our beautiful towers in the Skymall magazine. I was like, “This is it, this is going to make us famous.” It’s going to be amazing. When those orders would come in specifically, I would write a handwritten note and put in the box and send it off.
All the other regular stuff, somebody else did. They bring in this box and they say, “Did you pack this?” I said, “If it’s a Skymall one I did, if it’s not, no.” I look at it and I’m like, “Yes, that’s my client.” They open it up and there’s nothing in there but beautiful candles and a note, and they said, “Okay, take it back to FedEx.” I’ll never forget that night. They were there for hours and hours. There were other people involved.
You must have felt so violated.
I was terrified. I was so scared.
Where was your father in all this?
He was driving to South Dakota with the girlfriend.
He didn’t even know this was going on.
He knew because of eventually, I’m like, “I don’t know how to answer some of these questions,” we literally called him on the speakerphone and the people were like the DEA guy was talking. It was a mess. Now here I am, I now have no money. All the assets are frozen in the not only for the business but even just my personal checking account, like I had no access to money. I have to make a decision. What do you do? Do I take us back to Minnesota, where we could go back to our family there, our friends there, and get back to life or do I keep my promise to my daughter and break generations of broken promises and lack of integrity and all of the things and just that chain of not feeling safe. At the end of the day, I decided that was the most important thing for me. We stayed.
Which really speaks to your integrity and the fact that you’re a conscious parent. It speaks a lot to who you are.
Thank you. A few hundred thousand dollars in debt later and going back therapy and doing figuring out, I got a real estate license and I was selling real estate and it was great but also very inconsistent and then started actually working for a title company coaching realtors on building business and relationship and all the things. I decided that that was probably a great time to start dating for the first time. That’s a good idea, right?
You had nothing else to do.
Yeah. In therapy, dealing with the father stuff, writing letters that I was never going to send because you can’t fuel the fire but again, processing the anger and the sadness and I never really felt outside of the realm of those two emotions very much. There wasn’t much joy, there wasn’t a lot of hope and excitement and that part of me was like, “There has to be a better way because I’m not being the best mama if I am in this state.” She couldn’t have processed it, she was too little, but she never knew any of this had happened until she went to college.
I kept it from her all of those years and protected her from any of the craziness. I internally was never settled. I’d hear a noise in the night and I thought somebody was coming to get me. Anyway, it was a Monday. I put a profile on Match.com and these people start reaching out and went on a couple of dates, and I was like, “This is terrible, maybe I don’t want to do this.” I went on a date and it was okay, there was something about it that felt a little bit nice so I agreed to a second date.
In the second date moment, I knew in my gut that this was not the person for me, but now I had even more evidence that I was so broken and clearly, my dad as a child, my first husband, my dad as an adult, like there’s something wrong with me and maybe my expectations are too high. Maybe I can’t trust myself.
I love how it’s all about you, it’s not about any of them. How much more work can you take on, right?
It was clear to me very, very early on that this was not okay and I talked myself into that, “Maybe this is it for me and maybe I just need to lower my expectations.” It took me into an incredibly abusive relationship and it took me much longer to get out of that than I would have liked, like two years in a full-on emotional, mental.
Part of it was she had not healed a single thing that had happened to you so you were still attracted to the same characters who had hurt you.
That’s what your brain and your unconscious mind, that’s what it continues to go towards that because it we’ve survived that. It doesn’t know how to do anything else and part of the unconscious mind, it keeps us safe and it wants resolution. The only way to get resolution is to keep replaying the horrible chaos inside of human relationships until you’re able to actually heal it.
When I finally got out, it was my line in the sand moment. It was never again. Never again will I be in a relationship or in a situation where I am told that I am too much in one breath and not enough in the next. Shrink myself so I’m not outshining anyone and then also make myself into somebody that I’m not so I can be a fantasy in this other area for you. Just the crazy making of making me feel like I was crazy and imagining things. It was just it was horrible. I said, “I have a good life. I have the most incredible little girl in the world. I have friends, I’m just going to do that.” I was trying to convince myself that that was okay and that I was resigned to the fact that I was never going to be loved in the way that I had imagined and that I just needed to accept that.
Clearing Your Head Of Repetitive Negative Patterns
I know you eventually you get to a place where you start to rebuild your life. You’re now going to start transforming all that happened to you in this framework for healing. Let’s talk about that segue with all that happened to you, the betrayal and now you’re making the same bad choices over and over, same pain and the same repeated patterns over and over. Why did the flashlight go on in your head that it’s not about your flaws? It has to do with other things that have happened to you that need healing. When did that realization come to you?
I think it was because again, being back in a traditional therapeutic environment and one day, I just went, “This is crazy. I don’t want to tell the story anymore.” again, we talked about this earlier, you’re in the story, you just keep telling the story and that you’re in it, that’s who you are, that’s your identity, that’s what you’re thinking about, what’s been mixing with your physiology and creating your emotions and your behavior and your life. I was like, “This is like a never-ending cycle. There has to be a better way.”
My story is boring me. I need to change my story.
I’m sick of my story. It was by the grace of God, universe, all the things, something came across my life where I was introduced to something that then became really the basis for creating my life’s work. In a matter of weeks, not months or years, Irene, there were things that were just gone. There were parts of me that were gone.
What was this thing you were introduced to that did this magic for you? I know you’ve incorporated that into what you’re doing now.
Yeah, so it’s called quantum time release and it’s been used for hundreds and hundreds of years. It’s a multi-dimensional technique, gives us the ability to clear all the energetic weight that we hold onto at a cellular level. When we think about memory, we think about it being in the brain and yes, it’s alive in the circuitry. Really, we know science, generational stuff, animals, all the things, that memory is cellular. When we hold onto that and we don’t release it properly, then every single time we go into that, that charge is there, the body relives it as though it’s happening again, over and over again.
To give you a visual of what that actually looks like, if you imagine in our life every single negative emotion has a piece of ribbon, and anger, sadness, fear, guilt, shame, and then all of the noise and all of the limiting beliefs that we believe to be true about ourselves. Every single time we have an experience with one of those emotions, a marble goes on that ribbon.
Anger, marble, marble, marble, sadness. When it’s not released, then we see all the things manifest in the physical anxiety, depression, overwhelm, self-doubt, confusion, illness, injury, disease, all of it because the body remembers. To be able to release that in a way that you don’t go back into any of the story or any conscious memory of any of the pain or the trauma in the first place is life-changing. Once you release that, now you actually have room to create the life that’s meant for you.
May I ask you also, how do you release it? Is it just through talk or is it through hypnosis or is it through channeling? What is the mechanism that helps it get released?
It’s a completely unconscious process, but what I mean by that is we’re tapping into that other 90%, the unconscious mind. You’re not unconscious, you’re just very comfortable and very relaxed in wherever you are. If you think about the body everything from the neck up is the conscious mind. It’s everything we know we know, it’s our goal setter we use it all day long. Which means the rest of the body, everything from the neck down, the other 90%, is our unconscious mind. If the conscious is our goal setter, the unconscious is the goal getter. It’s the operating system. As we just spoke about, it’s the literal library of everything we’ve ever experienced in our lifetime.
In this particular process, it’s being able to tap into that other 90% and being able to clear all the charge because when something happens today that makes you feel sad, it’s not so much the today thing, it’s the 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 years of that built-up charge behind it. That’s what we get to release. It’s just like a pantry or a closet and I’ll use pantry because I had this experience and I just turned 50 and I have a little perimenopause situation and I have a little ADD and I love organized things and also stuff just piles up around me and I just want to shut the door and walk away.
My pantry was full of stuff and I took it all out and I put it all over the kitchen and I cleaned the pantry and as I was going through stuff, there was a bunch of expired things, old pasta sauce and orzo and crackers and whatever and I threw it all away. What was left, I put back in the pantry and it was organized and amazing.
It’s the same thing up here. You have to get rid of all of those expired ways of thinking and processing and what that identity is that you’ve been living that maybe was true for you 5, 10, 20 years ago and it’s not who you are now or not who you’re becoming. There’s this disconnect. It’s often why people don’t really know who they are when you say like, “Between now and then, what do you want? Who are you?”
If the conscious is our goal setter, the unconscious is the goal getter. It is the operating system. Share on X
I’ll bet a lot of people go, “I never thought of that before. That’s never occurred to me,” because they’re dwelling into what’s happened before.
They’re taking care of everything and everybody else oftentimes as a way to feel loved and to feel worthy and to feel whatever that they have absolutely no idea what they want or who they are. To be able to give people the ability to discover that is absolutely one of the most incredible, beautiful honors of my life.
Helping Women Step Into Their Sense Of Rebirth
How do you help women honor their grief without being defined by it and begin into to step into their own sense of rebirth? What do you do when they come to you and they have all of these issues and they don’t know how to release them and they are feeling guilty about their feelings as a result of what they’re feeling because we’re not supposed to feel we’re just supposed to be there for everyone else.
Yes, so first thing on the reframe on guilt is to quote the famous Dr. Laura, if any of you know who Dr. Laura is, she said something many years ago that I’ve never forgotten. “Save guilt for the things that are either immoral, illegal, or unethical. The rest of it isn’t really guilt.” That’s what we do to ourselves. We take this on like we shouldn’t put ourselves first, we shouldn’t take time for ourselves, we shouldn’t do these things because we should be taking care of everyone else.
First, I like to reframe guilt. The process that we go through in able to actually give that gift is in the beginning the methodology is clearing and creating and claiming. Before you can clear anything at all, we have to get clear. The whole basis of why I created this, here’s my fun little logo and on the end, it says, “Your very best life,” which for my whole life has been my life mantra. Whether we’ve been friends for 5 minutes or 50 years, I want you to live your version of your very best life.
Every single one of us has a slightly different definition of what that looks like. You can’t just go from the past trauma and pain and grief and loss and betrayal and childhood stuff to just living your very best life. We have to clear the story to create the life. Everybody says, “I want a different story.” The first thing I say is, “Great, stop telling the old one.”
It sounds to me like a lot of what you do is giving women permission to live an extraordinary new life and they have never thought about that or given themselves permission to actually think that’s a possibility.
Yes, and permission by itself is actually harmful, in my opinion, because it’s like we’re going to give you all of this permission and this clarity and it’s going to feel really good, and you’re like, “I have all of these a-has and now I know it and now it’s okay for me to do it.” However, if we don’t give you the skills and the tools and we don’t replace the neurology, now you end up in this maddening loop of, “Great. Now I know this, what do I do with it?” It then becomes more evidence that you don’t do what you say, it’s never going to happen for you, you’re not worthy, you’re not valuable enough, you’re not loved.” It’s so important that yes, you’re giving permission, but we’re actually clearing out all of the dysfunctional stuff than replacing it.
In a short amount of time, which is amazing. They’ve suffered for 40, 50 years and all of a sudden, in 6 weeks, bye-bye, and now I’m starting afresh. I’m starting to rebuild. That’s so cool.
Also, just to really frame that, the clearing, we have to also clear the patterns to create the partnerships because everybody wants amazing partnerships romantically, professionally, in our friendships, but when we burn all the old patterns, subconscious noise, all the old stuff that’s just wired in our body, we don’t get those partnerships. We just get more of the same.
I liken it to you got all this stuff in your backpack and until you can let go of the backpack, that stuff is keeping you from moving forward. It’s heavy.
You can’t get up the mountain.
Blending Modalities To Clear The Subconscious
You’re bringing all that everywhere you go. Can you walk us through how you blend the modalities that you use to help women clear the subconscious and also the imprints of grief that are in their bodies and betrayal and self-sabotage, which shape their choices? How do you help them become empowered? What is that like? What an amazing journey you take every woman through. You change lives. You’re helping them change their lives.
I would love to. Thank you. We talked about clearing and before we can clear, that we have to have that level of clarity and specificity that most people don’t have. It’s why most people actually don’t ever get what they want, especially women because of the things that we just talked about, taking care of everybody else and thinking that, “Yeah, they know what they want.” when I ask that question, there’s not really an answer because nobody’s been asked that way.
It’s just like going into a restaurant and sitting down and the server comes by and says, “What can I bring you?” we say, “Well, we’re thirsty and we’d like a salad to start and some protein and a vegetable.” They bring us an iced tea and a Caesar salad and a roasted chicken, and some lovely broccoli, and we got exactly what we ordered.
The problem is we wanted a glass of champagne and an arugula salad with beets and figs and goat cheese and a lovely piece of halibut and some roasted asparagus. That’s the difference of getting clarity around who you are, what your values are, what your non-negotiables are, what your desires are, in a way that’s so profoundly you that you don’t have to worry about trusting yourself.
At this point in the game, we thought we knew so many different times and look how that turned out. We don’t trust ourselves to know if this is a good idea or a bad idea or red flag or I’m just crazy. Now you have this thing that in a matter of minutes, you know if the values aren’t there and if there’s anything on that non-negotiables list or not on there, depending on.
It’s a clean no. You don’t have to spend days or weeks or months or years trying to figure out if this person gets to be in your life or if it’s you or if it’s them. When you get to make values-driven decisions and have that clean yes or clean no, you get out of the middle, which is the devil, which is the maybe, which is where all the confusion is and the noise and the drama and the decision fatigue that typically then you either make a decision out of fear or you don’t make one at all and then now you are at the mercy of and the victim of life.
Is it hard for you to empower people to cut off those toxic relationships that they’re carrying?
Not once we do the foundation part of this work because there’s such a sense of, “What if this is it for me?” Even in friendships. We talk about grief and loss around death, we talk about grief and loss around marriages ending, but especially with women, let’s talk about the grief and loss of a friendship that you thought you would have forever.
Get clarity around who you are. Determine your values, non-negotiables, and desires in the most profound way so that you do not have to worry about trusting yourself. Share on X
A friendship that you’ve had since you were 9 and 5 years ago, you would have said that on your 50th birthday, that person’s not going to be in your life anymore, but they’re still on the planet, there’s absolutely zero possibility of that. That’s a grief that is not talked about enough. I think too that that is a really big, important part of the conversation because it just becomes the other things that we don’t talk about. It’s not just about romantic relationships, it’s every relationship in your life.
That old relationship was with the old you, and now as you’re transforming and rebirthing, you have outgrown a lot of stuff and you don’t want to go back over there and that relationship is still living over there, which you outgrew.
Some of the behaviors in the relationship, too, mirrored the romantic relationship patterns like, “Please love me, please choose me, please.” Here’s the thing. When you’re in your story and it defines you and you don’t have that sense of self and you don’t have that external ability to trust yourself and you’re always looking for external validation, when it changes is when you’re able to then stand on your story because now it doesn’t define you. It refines you because you’ve been through all of this stuff.
You’re not in the drama of it. I can tell you all of these things and there’s no tears here, there’s no hyperventilating, there’s no drama. All of it’s happened. All of it happened and part of the reason that I am who I am, where I am, and what I’m doing. We often talk about gratitude and what we’re grateful for and it’s so important to understand that you can’t just be grateful for the good stuff. You have to be grateful for it all.
How Riana Found The Love Of Her Life
I feel the same way. I had a lot of trauma and healing it has enabled me to build into all of this. I want to ask you another thing. Your grief has brought you your healing. Your grief, and all that happened to you brought you this greatest gift in your life. You really have, you found a new love, a healthy love. You just celebrated a wedding anniversary and you call him the greatest love in your life. Can you share your love story with all of us and your happy ending with all of us? He did not meet and fall in love with the same woman who was in those other relationships at all.
Absolutely not. I created this work first for me and had I not, there’s zero chance in the world that we would be together because we don’t attract what we want, we attract who we are. That’s so incredibly important on a frequency level. He had also been in a marriage that was not great and he had three kids. He had been just the same, focusing on raising his kids, working, coaching all of their sports, two girls and a boy, being the best dad ever and not really out there doing a bunch of dating.
We met also on Match and we talked a little bit back and forth, and I could see by what his photos were and how he spoke like his whole life was how he loved his kids. Many years ago, after I got out of that relationship, I sat one day and I made a list of the dream person and from the big things like faith and family and you have to be a dad because you have to know what it’s like to love a child because Maddie’s my whole world, but your kids can’t be younger than her because when it’s empty nest time I want to that be empty nest time to loving country music to being taller than me like all these things.
I put it in a drawer and never thought about it again. When we met, we had our first date. It was at a place here that is near and dear to us called Piatti and we met and we had a just we met for a drink. We just had the most lovely conversation and we talked a lot about our kids and we talked about just the things why we did what we did and it was evident, I think, to both of us that it was really rare to meet somebody who had that same sense of parenting and putting their kids first.
I will tell you, it was God’s intervention that we did not have dinner together that night because the second that he left, Maddie, my daughter, was coming to meet me for dinner. She just had gotten her driver’s license and I had not told her that I was on a date. I told her that I was meeting some friends for happy hour. Between the time that he left and she got there, I took a bite of bread and my front tooth crumbled into a million pieces.
Genetically, I don’t have enamel, these are all crowns, but like literally, now I look like a bag lady with one like tooth thing and I’m sitting there in this restaurant going, “Oh my God.” If that had happened on this date, I would have like forget it. Mortified. That would have been the end. Called my dentist, literally, he and his wife and their baby were in Napa. They came home in the morning, met me at the dentist’s place and put a temporary on because then three days later I was taking my mom and Maddie to Maui for Christmas.
You’re going to Christmas with a temporary in your mouth.
Which was great, much better than what was there. Off we go, I go to Maui, like we’re talking, Maddie and I both get really sick. I’m pretty sure we were patient zero of COVID. We came home, it was horrendous, like we were both really sick. Nobody knew what it was at that time. I had mentioned briefly in passing, he had asked me about my favorite dessert. I’m like, “I’m not a huge sweets girl, I’m more of a savory, like give me crackers and cheese situation,” but I’m like, “Once a year on my birthday, I love yellow cake with chocolate buttercream frosting.”
Nobody makes it. Never thought anything of it. I get home, I’m sick, my birthday comes, and I was feeling better and he said, “I’d love to take you out for your birthday.” he picks me up, we go to dinner. At the end of our dinner, they bring out this cake in a box or on a thing and in a second, I knew but I was like, “This isn’t happening.” He had gone to a baker and said, “Can you please make me a yellow cake with chocolate buttercream frosting? I’m not a baker and it’s not on your list of things.”
He thought about that in advance, had it made, drove it to the restaurant before he picked me up to surprise me. In that moment, I knew this was my person because that’s what I dreamed of my whole life. Somebody who would think of me and think of something that would bring me joy and just for no other reason. Here was this man. Three years after that first date, he proposed to me at Piatti and we’re married.
That is so beautiful. I’m so happy for you. None of it would have happened if you hadn’t done your healing. None of it would, which is fantastic. You have this Clear to Create method, which I understand what you do, you’re helping them through these modalities to clear their past wounds and trauma to create a new life. You must probably work virtually with clients, I assume. I love that you have one important caveat. Do you remember what that is? I read it in researching you. It’s that your program is built for women who are ready to move, not process.
Yes. I’m like, “If you haven’t done the work, I’m not your girl.” You’ve done the therapy, you’ve done all the journaling, you’ve done all of that, now you’re ready for it to have this be your line in the sand and actually have it be done once and for all, I’m your person.
Take The Extraordinary Love Index
I love that. You’re like immediately saying, “Come to me if you’ve got the right mindset, but don’t waste both of our times if you’re not going to really do the work.” You also have a free resource that you’re offering to the audience of the show. Do you want to tell us about that?
Yes. It’s a diagnostic that I spent years building and it’s called the Extraordinary Love Index and it answers the question of what’s actually standing between you and extraordinary love? Yes, romantic love, but also self-love. It starts there. This is not a What Disney character are you? Quiz. It’s 40 questions, it’s a certified diagnostic, and it covers nine key areas that really look at recognition and attachment, trauma, communication, and all of these things.
I really invite you to give yourself a good 10 minutes at least to answer it thoughtfully because then what I send you is a 28-page personalized report based on everything that you said, looking at all of those areas and giving you that insight of, “This is what you might be experiencing in your life. This is why it might continue to be showing up. Here’s the cost of you staying there and here’s something you can do right now to actually move toward the life.”
When you can let go, you can move beyond your story and experience everything that is meant for you in this life. Share on X
Now does this information come from what you’re picking up psychically or from different things that you’ve done that inform what you said to these people?
I built the diagnostic and you answer those 40 questions and based on those things, gives me a very clear picture of what’s going on with you in every single area of those 9 key frames. I’ve had more people say to me that it connected more dots and gave them answers that they haven’t been able to get in five years of talking about the story in therapy. It’s my gift to your readers. I think everyone in the world should take the ELI because it’s going to give you insight about you in a way that you’ve never had.
Letting Go And Healing Yourself
That’s wonderful. I have a question because since you’re going to help all these people reading this, who are going to heal and find wonderful loves and all of that, what is your message about the importance of healing that you’d like to share? Your whole life has been about the importance of healing. It’s not about erasing the past. It’s more like about transforming it.
You have a choice we all have a choice and when I say suffering is a choice, hear me when I say I’m not saying that to be harsh, but when we fight with reality, when we want someone or something or a circumstance to be different than it is and we’re arguing with that, that’s the suffering. When you heal and when you are able to actually let go and put that down like you talked about the backpack, alchemical forgiveness changes it all. Forgiveness is a very triggering word for many people. I completely forgave my father, but he doesn’t get a seat at the table. He doesn’t get in.
I have the same exact experience with my father. I totally relate.
What it does is it says, “You know what? The thing that you did, what you did, all of those things, it’s not going to actually control my thoughts and feelings and behavior and inform my decisions anymore. It’s not mine to carry.” It’s the stopping of the insane drinking the poison every day and wanting them to die. When you can actually let go, that is the thing that moves you from being in your story to standing on your story and having the ability to actually experience all the things that are meant for you in this life.
Finding Genuine Joy Through Forgiveness
That is absolutely beautiful, Riana. You’ve been telling us the whole interview about this. What is your tip for finding joy in life? It sounds to me like it’s healing.
It’s healing, it’s letting go, it’s forgiveness, but it’s not staying in that constant state. Hear me when I say, if you’re reading this and you’re saying, “You know what? I’m too old. I’m past my prime. I know I am who I am, it is what it is,” I don’t care what’s been true for the last 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years. It has no bearing on what can be true tomorrow and it can be completely different. You have a future that you don’t even know is possible on the other side and it’s not about doing more or being more. It’s literally about being able to heal and transform in a way that doesn’t prolong the process and destroying all the trauma and it gives you freedom.
That is beautiful and a fabulous way to close this interview because I personally want to thank you for reminding us that healing is not about erasing the past. It’s about transforming our relationship to it because when we choose to heal, we choose freedom, which makes rebirth possible and enables us to create a life that finally feels aligned and authentically our own. In response to what you just said to everyone, better late than never. For sure.
Thank you, Riana, for sharing this extraordinary story with us, and your story is extraordinary, and for helping all of your clients finally move forward and experiencing the uplifting love story that matches the life they’re ready to live. You’re giving them quite a blessing and quite a gift to help them with that. From my heart, I wish you and yours, including Maddie, abundant blessings always. As I like to say, to be continued.
Guest’s Links:
- Visit Riana Malia’s website
- Take the quiz Extraordinary Love Index
- Check out podcasts that has featured Riana Malia
- Connect with Riana on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook
About Riana Malia
Riana Malia is a Board-Certified Neurosomatic Practitioner and creator of the Clear to Create Method™. She helps high-achieving women who have built incredible lives — the career, the family, the friendships, the lifestyle — but still find themselves repeating the same relationship patterns. Through her unique blend of neurosomatic practices, NLP, and quantum time release, Riana guides women to clear what’s been holding them back so they can finally claim extraordinary love that matches the life they’ve built.
