STOP THE CYCLE: Navigating Relationships for a Fulfilling Life

This blog is your guide to personal development that leads to building better relationships

Maman Cooper, Founder/Relationship Navigator

Welcome to Stop the Cycle, a personal development blog focused on building healthier relationships with yourself and with others. 

My name is Maman, and I am your Relationship Navigator. 

I founded Maman Cooper Speaks and Writes, a community where we work together to ultimately build healthier societies and a world where people can thrive and fulfill their destinies; healthy people and healthy relationships are key to healthy communities. 

Our model is one healthy person at a time, one healthy relationship at a time, one healthy partnership at a time, and one healthy family at a time. 

We accomplish this realistic mission through coaching sessions, facilitating conversations, and giving you practical ways to build the life you desire, deserve, and need. 

As your Relationship Navigator, I am here to guide you in building mutually supportive relationships in your personal and professional life.

My Background

 

Over the past ten years, I've used my passion for a healthy and thriving society by advocating for community building and challenging others to actively engage in the political system. 

Like it or not, politics affect our daily lives and community values, even for individuals who "don't do politics." 

I've had the incredible privilege to speak on stage to community leaders in various communities of all social, economic, and educational backgrounds, from middle schools, high schools, and universities to provosts and other university leaders.

I've also spent my time going into various communities to speak to community members in more intimate settings. 

Most of my profession has been in community advocacy and education.

Although I've loved my work, I often felt boxed into tasks that made it difficult to show up as who I really am, which is someone who genuinely loves people, prioritizes human connection, and provides people the atmosphere to feel seen and heard. 

I felt completely boxed into a job title and unending tasks. 

I wanted to be more than my job title. I wanted to truly serve people from my core because my life is more than my job.

Our lives are more than our jobs. 

Have you ever felt this way before?

Sometimes, we get stuck in jobs, even the jobs we love, but there are other ways we're destined to show up to the world and solve people's problems. 

If you're anything like me, you have or are currently on a mission to find a pathway that you can show up for the people you serve in a way that truly represents who you are. I've been on the search. 

Finally, I found it!

I hate to see people suffer. 

I love people, and one of the things that keeps me up at night is people and families who are living completely below their potential because they're suffering in their relationships, whether personally or professionally. 

My work with my business, Maman Cooper Speaks and Writes, which includes this blog, is an avenue to set people free one at a time by equipping them with information, tools, and tactics they need to live a much more fulfilling and purposeful life that is free of toxic relationships and environments. 

I've worked in toxic environments, and I was once in a very unhealthy relationship. 

It shocked me to learn from personal experience the severe impacts these kind of relationships can have on you.

A toxic relationship and a toxic environment are among some of the worst things that can happen to a person. 

Why? 

Because these kinds of relationships and spaces suffocate you, leaving you in what I call "survival mode." 

In survival mode, all you're trying to do is survive, leading you to waste your talents and gifts and live a life of mediocrity. 

My mission is to guide you so that you will move yourself and those that you love and care about from survival mode to thrive mode. 

In thriving mode, the typical days of your life are filled with healthy relationships and partnerships that help you sustain your peace so you can spend your energy on your life's mission and goals.

Stay plugged into this community because we will equip you to build holistically healthier lives.

Let's Get Personal

Here are some things you need to know about me: 

By the time I became a teenager and into most of my twenties, I was crystal clear that I did not want to have children or get married.

I only wanted to adopt children who didn't have a healthy home to feel loved in so that I would provide spaces for them to grow up having healthy lives.

Why? 

I grew up with violence, toxicity, and all sorts of abuse being the norm.  

Strong, healthy, and supportive relationships seemed like a foreign thing the people in my life didn't seem they could achieve. 

Honestly, I wished but didn't think I could achieve it either. 

I experienced abuse - specifically, sexual abuse, for the first time at a very young age. 

One of the impacts this experience left on me was that I began to see life and the world through the lens of a broken child, teen, and, later on, an adult who believed that the world was damaged.

So, to me, having a child or children felt like an act of violence because I believed that it would mean I was willingly bringing a child into the world, knowing they would get abused and suffer. 

Whew! What a sad lens to view the world. 

Marriage? 

Well, with the types of intimate violence partnerships I saw, what was the purpose of getting married just to end up with an unsupportive and abusive man? 

You see, abuse was so normalized that I had this belief that it was the norm. Thankfully, that was one norm I knew early on that I wanted nothing to do with. So I pushed away the want for a partner and a family. I thought that was the only solution to avoid falling into the cycle of abuse I grew up seeing. 

Over time, the desire for marriage, a family of my own, and a healthy relationship developed in me so strongly that to ignore these desires would mean killing a piece of myself due to the fear that a toxic relationship and a toxic family are my only reality. 

Thankfully, toxicity and abuse are not my ultimate reality, and they don't have to be yours either.

We don't get to choose the upbringing we had, but aren't you glad that we get to choose where to go from there?  

Isn't that such great news for many of us?

I made the decision to stop certain cycles I was born into and grew up with, such as childhood molestation, intimate partner violence, domestic violence, and a traumatic life. 

Instead, I am creating a new cycle of healthy, supportive relationships, mutually respectful marriage, wealth, etc. 

No child should ever grow up in an abusive situation. No person should be abused by an individual they choose to make a life partner. No one should suffer in their place of work because they have to make a living. 

This blog is to guide you to Stop the Cycle of toxic and abusive relationships and partnerships so you can show up as the best version of yourself to focus on what matters the most: yourself, your family, your significant other, friendships, business partners, and people at your place of work.

Did you realize I said "partnership" and not just "relationship"?

That was intentional. 

The relationships in our lives are not just our intimate relationships with our significant or potential significant other. Our relationships are not just with our friends, families, and neighbors. 

Partnerships are essential because they are how we primarily identify the relationships we have with those we work and do business with. 

That includes your job, business partnerships, even your significant other, and more. 

We struggle not just with our intimate relationships but also with our professional and other non-intimate ones.  

Regardless of which relationship or partnership you're struggling with, this blog is here to lead you to build healthier ones because you should be building relationships and partnerships that bring you peace, not ones that tear you into pieces. 

We all deserve a much healthier relationship, partnerships, and lives.

Are you going to partner with us to make healthier relationships, healthier partnerships, and healthier society a priority? 

We're so glad at Maman Cooper Speaks and Writes that the health of our relationships is a choice for many of us.

Welcome to Stop the Cycle! I am so happy that we're now a team! 

Cheers and love!

Maman, Your Relationship Navigator