Cleave: The Podcast — Season 3, Episode 1

This Ends With Me

An Honest Conversation with Brooke Hogan

Some of the hardest choices in life involve the people we love most. Brooke Hogan joins Jon and Ashley for a deeply personal conversation about family relationships, identity, grief, and what it takes to break patterns that no longer serve us.

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About the conversation

Some choices change everything after them.

Most of us grow up assuming that family is the one place where love and belonging come without conditions. For many people, the reality is far more complicated.

In this conversation, Brooke Hogan sits down with Jon and Ashley to talk about family relationships, identity, and grief, and about what it means to choose a different path when the old one is no longer healthy.

It's a conversation about the space between loving people and accepting everything they do, about the cost of keeping the peace, and about the courage it takes to decide that a painful pattern ends with you.

Whether your own family story involves closeness, distance, or something in between, we hope this episode helps you feel a little less alone in it.

In this episode

Key themes

5:04
Waking up to family dysfunction
How people start to see the patterns in their family, and why labels like “narcissist” get used too casually.
7:14
Growing up a Hogan
Being raised to please people, and how fame magnified patterns passed down through generations.
17:12
When one person starts telling the truth
Why families push back on change, including Jon and Ashley’s own experience.
34:41
The cost of being the one who grows
The people-pleaser role, why families resent change, and why leaving takes time and resources.
41:47
Siblings and distance
Loyalty in unequal families, and being treated as the problem for creating distance.
1:02:12
Grieving a parent who is still alive
The break with her dad, mourning a living parent, and what she felt after he died.
1:35:59
Peacemaker, not peacekeeper
Why Brooke is speaking now, how truth can divide families, and staying open to being wrong.
1:46:42
Shame and asking for help
Letting go of judgment, and not staying silent when someone needs help.

Times are approximate. Tap a time to jump to that part of the conversation on YouTube.

Jon and Ashley Lefrandt in their podcast studio

Your hosts

Jon & Ashley Lefrandt

Jon and Ashley are the husband-and-wife team behind Leave Then Cleave. Through their podcast, books, and community, they help people recognize unhealthy family patterns and move toward relationships built on truth, respect, and love.

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