WAVE: A Simple Tool for Riding Life’s Emotional Intensities
Some of the most useful things we ever learn come from a friend over coffee, not a textbook. In this episode, Mariah shares a powerful emotional processing tool she learned from her close friend Amy Fogarty, a nurse and yoga teacher based out of Santa Fe. The acronym is WAVE, and while it is simple enough to remember in the middle of a hard moment, its implications run deep. Mariah and Monique unpack it together, weaving in personal stories and a broader conversation about why so many of us were never taught to sit with our emotions in the first place.
Episode Highlights
What the WAVE Acronym Means and How to Use It
Why Running from Emotions Makes Them Bigger
How This Tool Applies to Parenting and Raising Emotionally Intelligent Kids
The Cultural Weight Women Carry Around Emotional Expression
Why Emotional Waves Are Also Where Growth Happens
A Challenge to Try WAVE the Next Time You Feel Flooded
What the WAVE Acronym Means and How to Use It
WAVE stands for Witness, Allow, Validate, and Explore, and it is designed to walk you through an emotionally charged moment rather than around it. You begin by simply witnessing the emotion: stepping outside of it just enough to observe that it is happening without being fully consumed by it. From there, you allow the emotion to exist without trying to push it down or rush it along. Then you validate it with genuine compassion, acknowledging that what you are feeling is real and that being human is hard. Finally, you explore: noticing where the emotion lives in your body, what it might need, and whether gentle movement, breath, or stillness could help it pass through.
Why Running from Emotions Makes Them Bigger
One of the most honest exchanges in the episode is when Mariah and Monique both admit that avoiding an emotion tends to amplify it. Mariah describes it as trying to swim past a massive wave only to get caught in the spin cycle, and references a friend who visualizes intense emotions as a dragon growing in the corner that only gets smaller once you walk over and befriend it. The episode draws a direct line between unprocessed emotion and the very real harm it causes, noting that people carrying unacknowledged pain tend to express it sideways, in relationships, in behavior, in their bodies.
How This Tool Applies to Parenting and Raising Emotionally Intelligent Kids
Monique brings up one of the episode's most resonant applications: using WAVE as a parenting framework. Rather than reflexively telling children not to cry or that something is not a big deal, the approach invites parents to let kids ride their own emotional waves. Monique reflects that by resisting the urge to stuff her children's emotions away, she raised kids who can now navigate their own intensity with maturity. Mariah echoes this by sharing how she handled her daughter's college rejection in real time, validating the disappointment fully before helping her look toward what might be a better fit.
The Cultural Weight Women Carry Around Emotional Expression
The conversation takes a candid turn when both hosts acknowledge the pressure women face to hold it all together. From media portrayals to professional settings where being "too emotional" is used as a criticism, women are conditioned to suppress rather than process. Mariah is quick to extend this observation to men as well, noting that boys are equally taught to stuff their feelings, which only compounds the problem across generations. The point is not that everyone should be emotionally demonstrative all the time, but that having a healthy tool for when intensity arrives is not weakness. It is wisdom.
Why Emotional Waves Are Also Where Growth Happens
In one of the episode's most encouraging moments, both women reflect on the relationship between hard emotional seasons and personal expansion. Mariah observes that looking back on her life, the periods of greatest growth almost always followed the most intense waves, not the calm stretches. The calm, she says, is necessary for gathering the energy you will need when the next wave arrives. Mariah also connects this to her work in weddings, noting that the most memorable moments in any experience tend to live in the highs and lows, not the perfectly uneventful middle.
A Challenge to Try WAVE the Next Time You Feel Flooded
Mariah closes the episode with a direct invitation: the next time an emotional wave catches you off guard, try working through WAVE before reaching for a distraction or a way out. A link to the full acronym breakdown will be available in the show notes so you can save it for a moment when you actually need it. The hosts encourage listeners to share how the tool lands for them, whether it helped them ride out something hard or gave them a new way to talk about emotions with their kids or partners. As Monique puts it, the time to learn to surf is before the big wave hits.
All Heart & Soul's Details:
Website: www.heartandsoulmastermind.com
Join the mastermind program: www.heartandsoulmastermind.com/heartsoul
Say hi to Mariah on Instagram: @mariahmckechnie
Say hi to Monique on Instagram: @moniqueforcier
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