You never think it’ll happen to you — until you’re staring down $150,000 gone and a partner you never really knew.
True crime lovers and financial feminists, buckle up — this one’s a wild ride. In today’s episode, I sit down with Emma Ferris, a renowned stress and resilience coach, podcaster and speaker, who shares the jaw-dropping story of how she was conned out of $150,000 by someone she thought she could trust — her romantic partner. Yep, this story has it all: love bombing, secret identities, fake businesses, and a bank sting operation worthy of a Netflix series. But more importantly, Emma walks us through the emotional aftermath — the shame, the trauma, and the bravery it took to reclaim her money, her voice, and her sense of self.
This isn’t just a cautionary tale. It’s a masterclass in resilience, intuition, and healing. Emma breaks down how she used somatic practices like breath work to process the trauma and why listening to your gut can be your most powerful form of self-protection. If you’ve ever ignored red flags or felt your intuition whisper something you didn’t want to hear — this episode will hit home in the most empowering way. Let’s get into it.
Key takeaways
Even smart, accomplished women can fall for cons — and that’s the point.
Emma had three degrees, ran her own business, and still got duped by a master manipulator. This takeaway smashes the myth that only “naïve” people get conned and highlights how emotional vulnerability, not intelligence, is often what scammers prey on. The story is a reminder that no one is immune — especially when love and trust are involved.
Shame is the con artist’s most powerful tool.
One of the most devastating parts of Emma’s story wasn’t just losing the money — it was the overwhelming shame that made her question her worth and stay quiet. Her healing began when she started to speak out. This aligns directly with the episode title because the con didn’t end with the transaction — it extended into her self-worth.
Your gut knows before your brain does.
Emma describes moments where her body screamed “something’s wrong” — but her mind rationalized it away. Her story underlines the importance of tuning into somatic signals (tight throat, dropping stomach) as legitimate warning signs. That connection to intuition could literally save you — emotionally and financially.
The justice system still doesn’t take financial abuse seriously — especially when the victim is a woman.
Emma had to become her own private investigator, lie to the con artist’s face, and organize a sting operation — all while the police insisted he wasn’t dangerous. This takeaway exposes the gap in institutional support for financial and psychological abuse, especially in romantic contexts.
Breathwork and nervous system regulation are vital tools for healing trauma.
Emma breaks down the science and practice behind breathwork — not as trendy self-care, but as a life-saving tool for moving out of survival mode. She teaches that healing from betrayal and trauma isn’t just mental — it’s deeply physical.
Transforming pain into purpose is the ultimate power move.
From heartbreak and financial loss to front-page media and a global podcast, Emma turned her worst experience into a platform for helping others. Her sttory offers hope and illustrates that storytelling and advocacy can be key steps in reclaiming power after trauma.
Notable quotes
“Your body knows before your brain does — you just have to listen.”
“Shame is what keeps us stuck. Speaking about it is how we take our power back.”
“Healing doesn’t happen in your head — it happens when your body finally feels safe enough to let go.”
Episode-at-a-glance
≫ 01:37 Emma Ferris: Background and Expertise
≫ 06:14 Emma’s Journey: From Divorce to Deception
≫ 12:14 The Investment Trap: Red Flags Ignored
≫ 15:42 The Unraveling: Discovering the Truth
≫ 26:10 Aftermath: Emotional and Financial Recovery
≫ 30:07 The Turning Point: Prioritizing the Next Installments
≫ 31:48 Emotional Reactions and Support System
≫ 35:40 Healing and Moving Forward
≫ 37:37 Understanding and Overcoming Shame
≫ 41:14 The Importance of Gut Intuition
≫ 52:00 Breath Work and Stress Management
Emma’s Links:
Website: www.thebreatheffect.com
Conning the Con podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/conning-the-con/id1516505977
The Bravery Academy podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/the-bravery-academy/id1695921041
Online Breathwork courses:
https://thebreatheffect.thrivecart.com/breathe-right-course/
https://www.thebreatheffect.com/transform/
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Meet Emma
Emma Ferris is a renowned coach, podcaster, and advocate for personal transformation. With a background as a physiotherapist and nearly 20 years of experience in stress management and resilience, Emma has dedicated her career to helping individuals navigate life’s toughest challenges.
She is the host of two successful podcasts: Conning the Con, where she shares her harrowing story of being financially conned out of over $40,000 USD that we’re talking about today, and The Bravery Academy, which features inspiring stories of resilience from around the world, including top scientists and researchers.
Emma’s work is rooted in the belief that healing from trauma and navigating life’s uncertainties starts with consistent, mindful practices. She helps clients break free from survival mode and thrive, using powerful tools like breath work, somatic practices, and mindset shifts to release stress and rebuild lives.
When she’s not coaching, podcasting, or speaking, Emma enjoys time with her two kids in Queenstown, New Zealand, where she is building a life focused on creating security and well-being for herself and her children.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
True crime lovers, rise up, because we’re digging into the absolutely harrowing story of how Emma Ferris was almost conned out of $150,000, plus the practice she used to guide herself through intense stress and trauma. Let’s get into it. Hi, financial feminists, thank you for joining us. I’m so excited to see you. I am Tori. I am a New York Times bestselling author, I’m a money expert, and I’ve helped over 5 million women save money, pay off debt, start investing, start businesses, and feel financially confident. If you’re wanting to know where to get started in your money journey and you’re feeling so overwhelmed, we have a free resource for you. Additional to all of these 200 episodes, you can go to herfirs100k.com/quiz, fill out about eight questions, and we will deliver you a free personalized money plan straight to your email inbox. So again, herfirst100k.com/quiz. Today’s episode, first of all, is fantastic to listen to because our guest is Kiwi. She’s from New Zealand, and I just love the New Zealand accent. But also, it’s a hell of a story.
It’s great for anybody who, like me, loves a good con grift story, but also is so actionable in terms of how we can start to trust our bodies, how we can start to trust our intuition, and how to recover from intense trauma using the skills and the expertise that we already know deep down inside. Emma Ferris is a renowned coach, podcaster, and advocate for personal transformation. With a background as a physiotherapist and nearly 20 years of experience in stress management and resilience, Emma has dedicated her career to helping individuals navigate life’s toughest challenges. She’s the host of two successful podcasts, Conning the Con, where she shares her harrowing story, like she will today on this episode, of being financially conned out of over $150,000, and The Bravery Academy, which features inspiring stories of resilience from around the world, including top scientists and researchers. She helps clients break free from survival mode and thrive using powerful tools like breathwork, somatic practices, and mindset shifts to release stress and rebuild lives.
We talk about Emma’s harrowing journey of being conned out of $150,000, including how she ignored red flags with her partner, and ultimately how she was able to recover most of her money by conning the con man back and get the justice that she deserved. This is one you’re going to want to share because, oh my God, I couldn’t stop talking about it after. We also talk about Emma’s work in somatic breathwork, which she used to overcome the trauma of her situation, and how she now helps other women overcome their trauma and stress with simple breathing practices that you can do right after this episode. So without further ado, let’s get into it. But first a word from our sponsors. Where are you from in New Zealand?
Emma Ferris:
I’m from Queenstown, which I’m hoping you’ve been to.
Tori Dunlap:
So sorry. Okay, so we went to… Isn’t that South Island?
Emma Ferris:
It is South Island, yes.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, I’ve only done the North. Yeah, I’ve only done the North. I know.
Emma Ferris:
What were you thinking? Who was your travel agent?
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, so here’s the deal, is my friend and I, when we go on trips, what we’ve learned is trying to do too many things doesn’t allow us to truly appreciate. And we did, this was Fiji, Australia and New Zealand all in one trip.
Emma Ferris:
Oh.
Tori Dunlap:
But we spent the vast majority of our time in New Zealand. We just did the North though, we spent a few days in Wellington and then a few days in Raglan.
Emma Ferris:
Cool. Did you go for surfing?
Tori Dunlap:
No. This is my favorite thing, is that we find cool Airbnbs in fun locations and build the entire trip around that. And it was also like an hour and a half from Hobbiton, which was a priority. But you all are the nicest people. I did not understand bird watching. I was like, I don’t get this as a hobby, and then I went to New Zealand and I was like, oh, I get it.
Emma Ferris:
We have birds, that’s why you want to watch them. Yeah, lots of them.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and the sounds, the singing the birds do is so exquisite. It’s beautiful. And yeah, I would really love to go back. I went in 2022 and loved every minute of it.
Emma Ferris:
You need to come back. You need to come back and visit this beautiful South Island. We have glaciers.
Tori Dunlap:
I want to move.
Emma Ferris:
Oh, you need to move. It’s a good reason to move over actually. We’ll have you here any day.
Tori Dunlap:
Are you in New Zealand right now?
Emma Ferris:
Yes, I am. Yeah. Yeah, I’m actually in my office with my crazy wallpaper. So this is my home.
Tori Dunlap:
How is the future? Is it looking better than today?
Emma Ferris:
It is. We are a day ahead over here. Yeah, it’s looking good. Bright and sunny. Sunny, absolutely.
Tori Dunlap:
That was the fun thing when we went home, is we had five different breakfasts, because just the way the time changed. It was the first time I’ve ever had two breakfasts on the same day, but at different times. So I had breakfast in New Zealand and then flew to LA and then had breakfast on the same day, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is time travel. This is the closest we’ll get to time travel. Oh, I could talk to you forever about New Zealand, but that’s not why you’re here. Emma, tell us what you do and why your work is so important?
Emma Ferris:
Well, my work has come out of my crazy life experience, which I think we’ll talk a bit more about today, but I’m a stress and resilience coach now. But my background was actually a physical therapist, you would say in America, but physiotherapist we say here. And so I’m very body-based, and learning around the way that the mind the body connects has been a really big passion of mine. But also because of the people that I’ve worked with for almost 20 years, seeing the way that their body responds to stress has been the biggest catalyst to go, okay, we’re not doing this very well, and I want to figure out how we communicate and work on this better.
Tori Dunlap:
And the biggest reason you’re here today is to talk about a very stressful event in your life. Can you tell me what happened?
Emma Ferris:
Yeah, so in 2019, I was not completely newly single. I have two kids that are now in their tweens and teens, but at that time I had two young kids, and I had gone through a very amicable divorce. My ex-husband and I, we’re an epic team, we do things really well now, but it wasn’t right. And at the time I lived at a very small community. I’m now in a bit more of a bigger city in Queenstown, which is the adventure capital of the world actually, apparently. But when I was, five years ago or six years ago, was at the top of the lake here and the top of the lake had I think around 400 people, so the dating pool was pre-limited. So when I was coming out, I was like, I’m going to go a little bit further afield, change my location settings, as you will. And so I started to go out online dating as my friends were like, “Come on, get out there, you got to do this.”
And it was such a journey after meeting my then, well now ex-husband at 21, to then go out dating in my late thirties. It’s like a world apart. And I was very naive in many ways and very honest and open, empathetic meeting people. And as I went to go and meet people, I met some lovely men. And I unfortunately met one human in 2018, because it flows over 2018 to 2019, the timeframe, that actually lied. And not lied just at a little, it was a web of lies. He even changed his name legally, so I couldn’t search who he was. So it was a pretty crazy experience. And the thing for me is that I’m not someone that would normally fall for these things. And this is what I understand as I’ve gone through this process. I’ve got three degrees, university degrees, I have been self-employed since I’m 24. There’s so many reasons why that as women, we can be more vulnerable to these experiences.
And that’s one of the reasons why I come and I thought, this is a great opportunity to share how this person worked his way into my life. Look at the red flags around it, around the ways that people behave and the choices they make, and then how do we heal from it. So when I met this con man, his name then was Andrew Thompson, and I didn’t know that it really, his name was Andrew Tonks. So my gut reaction when I met him, there were lies, there were some sort of stories and I was like, something doesn’t quite feel right. So I would go and Google, I’d do the research, because I’m a researcher, and nothing would come up. And so my thinking brain would come over and it would be like, oh no, this seems weird, it’s telling me this thing. And he seems really honest and he’s showing up in this way that I haven’t had before. And oh, how lovely that he’s doing this. And oh my goodness, he’s love bombing me, what a really nice way to feel after going through divorce and being single and all the things.
And over the six months, so not a very long time, but he worked hard to invest his time into that relationship. And he actually lived further apart from me, so I didn’t see him all the time. Which is also a really interesting piece around, when you are dating somebody, around how you feel when you leave them and kind of that feeling and the red flag around that. What does it feel like when they actually leave the room? And so there was sort of moments along the way, but it was just this place of grooming, that he would show up, he would share these things around, hey, he wants to help me get ahead. Or he’d listened to a story that I would tell about the way that I’d been working or done property investments before and how I really love that. And he’s like, “Oh, that’s so good for you. It’s so interesting.” And then a few weeks later, he had come in with this, “Hey, I think I can help you out with getting back into property and doing all these things.”
And so it was a slow little wee weave of stories that became kind of like, huh. Oh, well that’s interesting. Huh. Okay. And the short story, because there’s a lot more of it, he met family, he met my kids, he met some friends of mine. And around the six month, five month mark, he started to put things on the table around investments. Red flags. And it really was actually on the table. I went out one day to run a woman’s retreat that I do, and I came back and there was this little one-page note around, “Hey, here’s the idea that I have around helping you with the businesses that I’ve set up.” And he’d also set up fake businesses in New Zealand, which he couldn’t do technically, and that was because he had a criminal history, which I didn’t know about because of his past name change.
And so there was all these things that seemed like he was legit. I worked with my lawyer to then go, okay, this is a really interesting opportunity, we can make this work. What legal documents do I need? Because he’d put a document being like, yeah, you can sign this and this will be perfect. I’m like, nah, that ain’t good enough for me. There’s no way am I going to sign that. So I went to the lawyers and thought, look, let’s just explore this, I’m curious. And over a few weeks kind of went through that process. I talked about it with a really good friend of mine who I used to run the retreats with, and she just sat and was like, “Hmm. Hmm.” She’s a really spiritual person, really gut body lead person. And if it wasn’t for her, I would not be where I am today. Because she listened to her gut so deeply in that moment, where I was completely tuning mine out.
I was like, okay, well this is an opportunity. My financial scarcity mindset had been very much on overdrive since divorce. And I was like, I’ve got to make this work, I’ve got to provide for my family, I just need to figure out how I make this work to get ahead and provide this life that I want for them. And unfortunately, he knew that was my driver and used that as the catalyst to be like, I can help you be there for your family and be there for your kids. Wouldn’t that be amazing, babe? Babe. I hate how he said that, he’s actually Australian, so don’t confuse me with an Australian. I do love a lot of Australians, but that was his background. And so then it became quite a very quick timeframe where I did this investment. Part of me still has this gut reaction when I talk about the investment because it was actually, at that stage, part of my mortgage. Okay, definitely 101, do not do this.
So part of my business, not my business, but my house, I’d been able to purchase a home and I was really well set up. I lived in a beautiful area and I’d worked really hard even post-divorce to be at that stage with the kids. And I had some flexibility with my mortgage to then be able to do other investments, other things. And so he’s like, “Yeah, put as much as you want into my company. And here’s the interest rate that I’m going to pay you back.” Which was amazing. Also a red flag with it. And so I did that and he did exactly what he said, which was pay back the interest every week. Every week. Which is of course he was paying back with my money to me, and the initial payment, and this is where it kind of makes me go, it would’ve been around 25,000 US dollars. But that was the initial part. The next bit about a few weeks later, he’s like, “I can help you out.”
Let’s go to this next stage, we’ve already got the legal stuff in place. And this is the thing, it was a special relationship, as we go through with the court process, that made me realize it’s why it’s so different, and how financial abuse in relationships is something that people don’t talk about and women don’t understand and see these red flags. And I didn’t because I came from a very much a background of trust, of my parents being married for years. It just wasn’t on my radar that someone could behave this way. And so then I was like, okay, this is working. What is the risk? He is a good human, I say in quotes because I didn’t know the fact that he’d lied, and I had the backup of my lawyers and my documents. And if anything went wrong, then I was entitled to the companies that he’d already been involved with. And at that time, I wasn’t just the only pawn in his game, there was much more going on at the time.
He actually had a gin and vodka company in the area that I lived that he was also purchasing half of, and that was on the cards. He was also looking at buying a restaurant. He had been playing ball-
Tori Dunlap:
He was busy.
Emma Ferris:
And he was like, to be honest, he did really well juggling it. I looked back and I was like, good on you, you did so well. That could have all fallen over, until I got there. And I have to laugh at it because I honestly look at this process and go, what the absolute psychopath you were doing to even get to that point? And so I then got to the point of going, yep, I’m going to reinvest. Went back to the bank and my bank were all on board as well. These are things, these are people that had seen this and were like, yep, I can see what you’re doing with this. Because he was also involved with having an account out there. Didn’t mean he had any legitimate interest or anything like that, but he had an account at the same bank. That they were like, “Okay, let’s do this. You’ve got your legal documents.” So the short story then was I then invested a big chunk of money.
The total, from the 50,000 to the 25,000, would’ve been 150,000 US dollars. So a huge chunk. As a single mom, as a business owner, I’ve never, my biggest investment was a property, and I loved it. I loved property, that was my thing I knew. But this was a big piece. It gets crazy. So that was April the 9th, 2019. On April the 10th, 2019, my good friend sent me a message on Messenger and was like, “I need to talk to you. Is Andrew there?” And I was like, “No, no, he’s not here.” She sends me a link. It was the article of him in a New Zealand paper where he’d been arrested under the other name. She’s like, “We think this is Andrew. We’re really worried. I want to talk to you about this.” And I’m like, ah. Yeah, gut drop. Oh, I can feel it flooding me now. Because it still comes through the sensation.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emma Ferris:
So crazy. And that day was the day that I learned what fighting was about. I didn’t think I was a fighter, but it was one of the days that I really put the stress and resilience tools into action. And to be honest, I thought I was brave and I thought there was moments where I was like, I can speak in public and do these things, I can bungee jump. I’ve put bravery into action. I had no idea how strong I’d be until that day, and that day was crazy. So I ended up going into shock in many ways and not knowing how to deal with it. My friend came around and were like, “How do we deal with this? What are we doing?” I still had to go to work, which was one of the craziest things to be like, okay, I can see what you’re saying here, but I can’t change it. I’ve just invested so much, I can’t change this in this moment. I am literally stuck. And I got to go pay the bills.
And I worked with a really amazing American guy actually, who was from Seattle, who came over a very great place and a great human. It was about five minute drive, but out of remote access, like my phone wasn’t on. I got there, was working with him. And he’s like, “You okay?” I was like, “No, I think something’s happened really bad.” And a knock came in about 10 minutes later and it was my friend going, “You’ve got to go. Your brother,” who is part of my trust, “he’s managed to talk to the bank. We can freeze this if you go now.” If you go now. And I just, the chills come over as I think about that. So I race out, get into Southland reception and ringing him, I’m like, “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe this has happened.” He goes, “Doesn’t matter, ring the bank. You’ve got this.” And I managed to freeze the amount that had gone into his account, but I had no idea how much it was.
I had not been communicating with him except for saying, he’d be like, “Hey, how are you?” And I’m like, ugh, I don’t even want to talk to you, you’re an absolute psychopath. What have you done? How dangerous are you? I had no idea what he was capable of. I’d watched Dirty John, have you ever seen the Dirty John series?
Tori Dunlap:
I know of it, yeah.
Emma Ferris:
Yeah. So I’d watched that with him a few months before that and I was like, are you Dirty John?
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, sneaky bastard.
Emma Ferris:
Are New Zealand Dirty John?
Tori Dunlap:
He’s watching it with you?
Emma Ferris:
Yeah, he could have watched-
Tori Dunlap:
He’s taking notes.
Emma Ferris:
Yeah, exactly.
Tori Dunlap:
He taking notes. He’s in the back, he’s like, mm, that’s a good idea.
Emma Ferris:
Notes of how to do it from his time in jail. Yeah, it’s like, where do you go to learn about con men? Oh, you go to jail to do that. So it was absolutely crazy. And that day I was like, okay, I’ve got to talk to my sister who’s in London, who is my absolute soul sister, but sister, she’s eight years older, but she was the one that actually ended up doing the podcast with me where we tell the story, Conning the Con. And I had no idea, first of all, that I was going to tell the story or that where it was going to go, but I knew that I was going to fight. And that came from this mindset shift that happened on that day. I’d read some amazing books by a lady called Kelly McGonigal, Dr. Kelly McGonigal years ago on The Upside of Stress. And I looked at the research around stress mindset and the way that you respond.
And it was the most weirdest, surreal feeling where I was like, I’m going to choose that. I’m going to choose a mindset shift in this moment. And I remember sitting on the side of my bed, and it makes my throat just have this little bit of a grip when I think about it, and I remember sitting there going, nobody does this to me, nobody does this to me and I will fucking fight, was the words in my head. I will get out of this in the best place possible, whether it’s my financial, my emotional, my mental, my spiritual, my psychological, I will get through this in any way possible and he will not destroy me. And it was this weird moment that drove me through the days, the next few months, and probably to now, which is late five, six years later. And that day I then worked with the bank. My bank were actually amazing, the fraud department were able to, like I said, freeze it. And then they were like, “You’ve got two options.”
“Option one, you wait to see if we can get a police warrant and eventually get that money back down the track. There’s no guarantee on that. I can’t tell you how much is in there,” she said. And I was like, “Oh, I need to know this information.” How much, has he still got the 300,000 or the 150,000 US, or is it being changed? How much is even in there? Is it a dollar that’s frozen? Has he moved it already?
Tori Dunlap:
Wait, so I want to pause. Was it $150,000 or 300,000?
Emma Ferris:
So New Zealand, 300,000, which is pretty much half.
Tori Dunlap:
Got it. 150K American.
Emma Ferris:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So she’s big. She’s big and it hurt a lot at the time.
Tori Dunlap:
No, not a small amount of money, but that is an important clarifier.
Emma Ferris:
Not a small amount.
Tori Dunlap:
Wow, okay. Emma’s story is so crazy and we’re just getting started. Join us after the break to find out how she conned the con man right back and got justice for everything he put her through.
Emma Ferris:
And so then the bank was, “You’ve got the second option, which is you convince this person to come to the bank with you and transfer that money back over to you.” I was like, oh, I think it’s option B. I think it’s the second one. And so there was, I know, would most people choose that? I don’t know, would you choose that one, Tori?
Tori Dunlap:
For their health and safety, hell no. But for me, oh yeah, probably. I mean, who knows? Who knows? I have not been in this situation, so I can’t tell you. Who knows?
Emma Ferris:
True. My reasoning for it as well was, I am in a fully-camera’d area, there is security around, I’m as safe as I’m going to get having this incident. So there was messages back and forth between the con man and he’s like, “Hey, has something happened? Hey, what’s going on here? Oh, has your brother got involved?” Because he realized the money was frozen. Obviously he was trying to use something out of it, and I was like, so I basically had to become a different person. I’m not someone that lies or that normally would perform or act, but I was like, I’ve got to pretend that this is not happening to me and that he doesn’t know that I know, it’s the only way I’m going to protect myself and the family and what’s happening. So I ended up going to the bank, so convincing him, and he sent a screenshot saying there’s $200,000 in the account.
So I knew that that’s how much I was fighting for at the time, 200,000, so a 100,000 US dollars. And I was like, I need that money back. This is priority number one. I went to the police on the way down because I’d been in contact with police, and the weird thing is if he had attacked me or been in my house and done this, they would’ve been there straight away and taking all the things that needed to help protect me. Because this was a different kind of crime, a white collar crime, then it was seen as it’s not an immediate threat, and they were like, “We know who he is because of his past criminal stuff, we don’t think he is a flight risk and we don’t think he’s dangerous.” I was like, “Okay, I’m going to take you as your word with that.” And they were like-
Tori Dunlap:
Yes, I feel so much better. Thank you.
Emma Ferris:
And I remember thinking at that moment, it’s like, well, are you going to come to the place with me or am I not? Okay, I can do this myself. So I went to the bank and I drove there and the policeman was like, “And make sure you get a photo of the license plate,” or something. I’m like, yeah, that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to be like, okay, just go into PI mode, private investigator mode. But I did. I was like, okay, I can see the car, take the photo, and move through. Which was actually another key part of the story around him conning the leasing agency around cars. There’s a whole other piece of the puzzle, but not a big detail.
And I walk into the bank and I can see him coming across the car park, and because he’s been to the service station, which is right there, or the petrol stations as we say in New Zealand. I’m in the bank and the bank manager knows, the manager knows completely what’s going on. They’ve got the fraud department on standby. We pretend we don’t know, that that’s not happening. And the receptionist is like, “How’s your day?” I’m like, the fuck, how do I rub salt-
Tori Dunlap:
We’ll see you in a bit.
Emma Ferris:
How do I… Yeah, see in a bit, I’ll tell you after. And he comes in and he gives me this hug and wants to kiss me. I’m like, oh, my body’s crawling. And I just had to play the victim. And so I kind of wish I could see that video back because it is just so scary that moment in time for me. And it lasted, it felt like a very long time, but we had to sit on the couch while they got the paperwork ready to sign the documents. The manager came out and he’s like, “Well, I want that money. The money in the other account,” which is technically still mine but wasn’t frozen, “I want that out now. I want that,” $5,000 or $7,000 I think it was, “out now and today.” And she’s like, “Well, I’m sorry sir, we don’t have that money on the premises.” And his mask just dropped a lot more, this mask of calm, this behavior, it was dropping down.
And I was like, phew. And there was moments when I sat beside him that he did these sly threats, which was really, really scary at that moment. One was around my brother, and that he knows people that will go for him. Yeah, that was one. And it’s like, he shouldn’t have done these things, I know some people. And it’s like, ugh, okay. And he’s like, “You shouldn’t lie about people’s names and stuff.” Because what he said to me around, because I’d actually done some digging that morning to be ringing up the tracking agency that he worked for, all these things to understand what was the truth and what was not the truth. The property companies or the real estate agents that he’d had documents signed with to say, “Hey, is this person legit? Do you know that you are actually possibly working with a con man?” They’re like, “No. What?”
And so the threat he said to me is that they can take your children away for lying about your name. Bearing in mind, I’m like, “Oh my goodness, can they?” And I’m like, you lying, because you are currently lying to me about your name. Anyway, so I got him to sign the documents. We went out of the bank, I’m like, “Please tell me it’s done.” And he’s like, “Do you want to go get a drink?” I’m like, “Oh, I can’t, I have to get ready for work.” And in my head, I’m like, get the fuck out of here. I know. Get your ass out of here. And he left. And that was the last time I saw him until I think a few months later. The short story being, not that short, that’s why it’s in the podcast Conning the Con, is that the next two and a half months I had to work my butt off to keep my version of the con alive to get as much money back as I could.
And I did get a bit of a chunk of my money back, about 10,000 more after that. So at that point I ran back into the bank, they’re like, “It’s okay.” I’m like, “Have we got the money? Have we got the money?” And they’re like, “It’s okay. You’ll see it in a minute or in 10 minutes and there’ll be $200,000,” or a 100,000 US dollars, “poured across.” And I could see it straight away. And I was like, oh my God. This is so big. And I remember having tears. I just remember being like, “Thank you so much. You just had my back, you just protected me so much. Thank you. You have no idea.” The next two weeks I was really in flight mode. I was in the space of not knowing what was coming. After the police saying, we don’t think he’s a flight risk, we don’t think he’s dangerous, all those scenarios run through your head as like, I’m going to be okay.
Tori Dunlap:
Such bullshit too.
Emma Ferris:
Such bullshit. So I put my kids with my ex-husband. I was like, I’m not putting them under any risk with it. That was really hard and really lonely in many ways. And I couldn’t tell many people because of this. My family’s reactions, there was some real mixed pieces of people that did know, that was really interesting. One person’s comment, I won’t say who it was, but it does make me smile and laugh at the same time, was like, “Oh, I lost a similar amount in the share market crash.” And I’m like, “Hmm, were you dating the share market? Are you actually dating the share market?” Yeah. So there was a lot of pieces where I was like, are you actually serious? I need to get through this. If you can’t see that my oxygen mask has completely fallen off, I’m not really a hundred percent right here, and I’ve got to get through this in the next way as best as possible.
And one other comment, which I loved, was someone saying to me, “Well, I could have told you he wasn’t good.” And I was like, “Well, that’s really useful right now.” Okay. So there’s so many moments along the way. At that point, two and a half weeks, he jumps on a plane. I’ve been working with the police by that stage. I know, kind of hallelujah. But also like, damn you, I didn’t get you in time. Because it’s so slow. So he flies back to Australia where his family are, in Tasmania, and he then continues the messages back and forth for two and a half months. I’ve got this lot of messages and he deeps dive into his narrative, which I haven’t got to, where he thinks he is a secret agent. Yes. And so it gets better. He wrote me a whole story. So about two days afterwards, this is where the laughter therapy comes in. I still can’t believe it happened to me.
He wrote the story and he sends through this first few chapters, bearing in mind at this time I’m freaking out and going, I need to figure out how I deal with this. Do I deal with the police? And he sends something going, this is going to really help you understand where I’ve come from, it’s going to give you the understanding why I’ve done the things that I’ve done. He sends through this, I think it was nine pages that start, story of his life, the Tonka Trilogy, because his last name’s Tonks. One of his last names. And the way that he shares it was just so crazy. And it comes into my inbox like, ping, and I immediately ring my sister in London, I was like, “You’ve got to sit and listen to this.” So this becomes actually part of the podcast because I was like, I’ve got to record this, I don’t know what is going on here.
And it is a hundred percent laughter therapy. The titles that he’s put in there, the first one was, I was a fat kid, no, and I loved cake. And then it’s like nine. And then it gets into his stories around secret agent and how he’s done and how he got-
Tori Dunlap:
Men are… What’s wrong with you? Men, legitimately, what’s wrong with you guys?
Emma Ferris:
Yeah, I mean I don’t blame all of them, but definitely this one’s got some psychopathic traits here. Not that I’m a psychologist or diagnosing him.
Tori Dunlap:
Absolutely. Oh my God.
Emma Ferris:
So crazy. So then at that point I was like, screw the money, I want the next install. This is way worth it.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s like a serial Charles Dickens. You know how they would release in the magazine. Every month you’re like, give me the next one.
Emma Ferris:
Oh, you’ve got me hooked. What did you do in America when you were in Vegas with your friends at a bowling alley and when you were asked to go and be an undercover agent? Oh, I just want to know. So over the next few weeks he did send some more and then he pretended that he was in Melbourne and helping out on a undercover thing. “I’ve got to go dark on you,” was his code language. My goodness. Text messages. So fast-forward to it. I mean that’s the funny thing, is you look at this and you go, what? I don’t know how I got myself set up for this. And then two and a half months forward, fast-forward, and I am keeping it together, I am running my practice and I am doing my coaching, and people don’t know massively what’s going on. And I get this phone call from the detective, Detective Matt, who was an absolute godsend all the way through.
And he’d actually caught Andrew twice before, which is why he’s like Andrew did not like him for that reason, because he thought he had it out for him. He didn’t have it out for him, he was just a really good cop doing his job. And I got this call from Detective Matt saying, “We’ve got a call that Andrew is inbound coming into Christchurch in the next,” Christchurch being an international airport, “coming in the next half an hour and landing. I will let you know what happens soon.” And my jaw drops, because I know there’s an arrest warrant waiting at the airport for him, full on border security. I wish I had the footage to see what happened when he gets off the plane. That day, I was like, drop to my knees, I think I screamed, I cried, I hailed like a witch somehow.
I was just like, what the actual, this is actually coming to an end? And then I had to go pick up my kids from school. I was like, what’s going on in this world? And my good friend was there, who was the one that came over and told me about him, had done the background research along with my other friend, and I was like, “I think they got him.” They’re like, “What?” “I think they’ve got him.” Again, fast-forward, and I get the phone call about three hours later and the kids are playing and I go outside and he’s like, “We’ve got him. He’s on the way to Christchurch Police area and we’re going to go to the next process.” And I remember thinking then, I can breathe. I can finally breathe. And the truth was, it actually wasn’t, it was starting to recover. I’ve been breathing all the way through, I’ve been doing the work that I’ve been doing all the way through. It was then that I could start to recover.
And I was actually getting on a plane a week later to go to London to see my sister, with my kids. Just the kids and I, they were young. And it was such a big deal. I remember getting off the plane after having got through that process of him being arrested and just being feel like she’s picked me up and took me back. And we tried to capture the story then, but it was just so raw. There were so many layers, but more lies just kept coming out. And I can’t even go through all the lies because there were so many, that’s why the podcast is crazy. He was trying to change his name again, he was working on the restaurant deal. And over those few more weeks after that, we began to unravel more people and more stories. Nobody else he was dating, that I know of, but people that he was hurting. And it was then he was arrested. He tried to get off on bail, but he wasn’t allowed it, which because hey, he was a flight risk, so not a good thing.
And it was from April 19th, or 2019, I should say, arrested in June. And he didn’t plead guilty until my birthday in December that year. Very annoying birthday present. And then I went, oh, I don’t have to go to court and I don’t have to testify. But it was actually five years ago, yesterday I realized, and I went down and I shared my victim impact statement in the court, and I had my soul sister, Sasha, with me. So the woman that I run the retreats with. And she was like this big energy umbrella around me, it was just so amazing to have her there and the detective, and to go through this most horrific experience of speaking at court, which I chose because I wanted to take that power back as a woman. I was like, this is about finding my voice. He will never change his ways, but I will show and I will get this out of me so it does not stay in me. And I got up and I remember saying my victim impact statement and it feeling like just so guttural and raw but powerful.
And then I sat down and the judge went through the crimes and how much he was charged with. So he was going to be charged with two and a half years in prison. And the judge was like, “I wish I could give you more,” is what he said. “I wish I could give you more. But what I can do is have you pay the reparations.” It ended up being around 80,000, I think they said they had to pay. I have not seen 1 cent because he went over to Australia after that, and I never will. And this is not about revenge [inaudible 00:35:04] story, this is about protection. And I already know by telling my story and it getting into national media, front page of New Zealand like Herald Magazine, was that more people will be protected, not just from him, but will look at the red flags. And that was the reason why when I did the Colin, the podcast, we brought a psychologist on and we share these reasons of why you can look out for this, and then how you heal.
Because we all go through our own trauma in our lives and we all need to be able to figure out how we navigate it. But we’re not given the toolbox. We’re not given this toolbox of how we deal with these hard moments. Like we’re not given the financial toolbox. So we have to resource ourselves. And that’s been very much my mission, is to go, well, I’ve got to figure out, when I put my oxygen mask back on now, how am I going to get from the state of just surviving and just getting through to thriving in the best place that I could be? And I can say that in five years later, since speaking in court, that half a decade later that it is, I’m in the best place I could ever be. I get to travel the world for work, I get to share and coach amazing people and offer this wisdom around how we take control and how we move into bravery, and how our body will keep the score unless we learn to shift it.
Tori Dunlap:
I still cannot believe Emma’s story. Well, I can, just because there’s so many people out there trying to grift. But when we come back from a word with our sponsors, we’re talking about the red flags that Emma missed early on, how to make sure you don’t fall for something like this. And how Emma is helping other women work through trauma and shame and learning to trust our guts.
Oh wow. Okay. Emma, I have so many follow-up questions. I think every time, because I am obsessed with these stories, full disclosure, stories like yours, I do love hearing, not of course, I love the experience, it’s awful.
Emma Ferris:
No.
Tori Dunlap:
But it is so fascinating from a psychological perspective. And one of the things that comes up all of the time with people who have joined a cult or have been conned is that they were smart people. I think the expectation from any bystander or listener is like, oh, well, no one would fall for that, right? But very smart women fall for it all the time. So talk to me about that feeling of like, oh gosh, how was I so naive or how was I ignoring these red flags? But also the understanding of like, no, I was manipulated.
Emma Ferris:
It was a really big space to notice the shame. So shame is one of the biggest emotions that’ll block us after this. And when I look at the way that we move forward, if we don’t recognize shame in the first place, it will keep us stuck. And I know that the women that have been involved with this con man and have reached out to me and told their stories as part of the podcast, that was one of the blocks, why they wouldn’t either share it as well. And shame kept them stuck. And that was something for me, where I had to make peace with and be like, this is not my fault, I had made choices and I thought I had the evidence. And I now know that I need to listen to my gut more often, and I now know how to protect myself in a different way.
And so a lot of that was around being kinder to myself and using the self-compassion tools. And then going, if I’m going to actually replace shame here, I have to speak about this and own the fact that this is not something that was happened to me. And I think the words from the judge, which was pretty amazing on that day, which was that he said, “There is nothing that this victim, Ms. Ferris, has ever done to deserve this.” And I remember having this bubble of tears at that moment being like, I didn’t. And so I will prove to people that there are ways that we can get through it because it is just, we shouldn’t feel shame. We shouldn’t feel shame and blame. But we feel this at so many levels. If there’s financial abuse, emotional, physical, sexual abuse, this is still the layering. Obviously it hits in different ways, but it is still this piece around going, it happened to me, what did I do? The blame. And I was like, no, it was a mindset shift, it was like, no, he can’t take that from me.
Tori Dunlap:
The other thing that strikes me about your story, which pisses me off so much, and you mentioned abuse. This is very common, especially in the United States, where women will say, I’m being abused, there’s domestic violence situations, or I’m being financially abused, but the police don’t take them seriously. Or they come and they do their visit and then they leave and they say, oh, well he has to hit you or something. The aggressiveness has to be at this level in order for us to do something. How was that experience of you basically having to play fucking undercover cop for any sort of justice to be served? You were having to live in that trauma in order to get your money back.
Emma Ferris:
Oh, it was what it was, because I didn’t have any other option. And I think in many ways it shouldn’t be that way. I know it shouldn’t be that way.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, they made you not have any other option.
Emma Ferris:
No.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, it sounds like they were like, either you win your own money back or you’re fucked.
Emma Ferris:
But in saying this, in New Zealand, we’re actually quite a well-developed country, like America. But there’s still this discrepancy in it. So I think there’s a lot of, if I sit back and [inaudible 00:40:23], I’d be really angry. I’d be really angry at the justice system and the way that it was managed, the way that they had put it in, the sentence that he gave. I could keep fighting, but it wouldn’t change it from there. But I think that’s the piece, is that we are disadvantaged. And the reason why for women it’s just so hard to get out of these situations, particularly when finances is part of it, is because we don’t have the security net and we are disadvantaged.
You talk about it in your book, as women when we separate in the first place, we are way worse off for retirement. And any of this sort of stuff, if you separate when you’re in an abusive relationship, you are already in way, way back on the back foot. Plus you’ve got children that you’re going to probably going to have to parent, and you’ve got to be able to try and figure out how you get ahead. And that means you’re in a survival state for years, years and years and years and years.
Tori Dunlap:
I hope a lot of women are not in a situation that you are in. But I think we constantly, as women, get signs from our intuition and our gut. How do we start actually learning how to hear our gut and our intuition? How do we respect hearing our intuition? And then how do we have the bravery to actually act on it? Even if it makes people uncomfortable, even if it rocks the boat, even if it is something that we know other people won’t like.
Emma Ferris:
Such a good question, Tori. I wish someone had taught me this and asked me that and looked at years ago. I’ve learned a lot around the gut intuition and around how that second brain is actually around that threat response and detecting things before even our thinking brain is doing it. That is so powerful, so powerful. One of the things that I find for women is that we are so good at overriding it because we have beliefs that are stuck there, that we have to be the good girl, the people pleaser, all the things around fitting into society, that we’re too busy in our head with the narrative. So part of it is because we’re not being embodied, we are not semantically skidding into our body and finding space to be calm, to listen in. So it’s around being a space maker. If we don’t take time, if we don’t know the skills, if we’re never shown, I was never modeled listening to my gut.
I was as modeled, listen to the authority, listen to what, this is the standard, this is the way you’re supposed to be. And so I had to go on such a journey with that. And probably my big part of that is learning more the somatic tools, learning more the breath work because I am a type A, high achieving woman, personality driven. And so my thinking brain, for years it was always the driver for me, and it was the thing that would get me going. But when I learned around the nervous system, the power of our nervous system and how we don’t connect with it, how we’re so disconnected from our mind and body. That I was like, well, here’s the key piece. It is the breath part that is what’s going to get me into my body. And when we do that, we begin to bring the blood flow back into the gut brain in the first place.
We begin to actually slow ourselves down so we can listen in. And I think that the thing is, I’m very black and white from my background, is my three degrees, my science background. But yet the woo woo of it is that you have to feel, just like emotions, you have to feel emotions, you have to feel and experience your body. And if we weren’t taught what that looks like, it can feel really uncomfortable to even start. And the real crux of this, is around safety. So when you talk about the abuse and the survival levels, it’s all around safety that we are creating. And as women, our safety response is very different from men. It’s why we actually, when we are with other women having a conversation like this, our stress levels go down when we listen to other women because we feel connected and safe. It’s this tend and befriend stress response, which is different from men. We need other women around us to make us feel safe in our community. And so we can’t listen to our gut if we are not in safety mode.
Tori Dunlap:
I want to call out for all of the listeners. Emma, in your story, everything you just said over the first 25-ish minutes of this episode, when you’re talking about the experience. Something that I wrote down that I want everybody, if you did not notice, please go back and listen to her story again. The first time you heard it was the, oh my God, holy shit, this happened. Please go back and listen, because you can tell how actually embodied you are because there was four or five times you said, oh, I can feel it in my throat, or I can feel it in my stomach, or even the experience, right, I’m right back there and I feel the stress in my body. That’s what we’re talking about when we say that we’re in tune with ourselves enough, where we are starting to listen to our guts, determine where our intuition lives and where our fight or flight lives. Because for me, when I get nervous, it’s the same thing, my gut drops. I start, and again, it’s going to be hard if you can’t see me and you’re just listening, but I start shrinking.
Yeah. My chest starts getting heavy or tight, and then it starts feeling like there’s pressure here. These are the kind of things that I’ve had to identify, and I’ve done work with energy coaches and with other people to figure that out. Because we are in a society as women where our intuition is our greatest superpower, but it is a threat to everything. It is a threat to the power structures, it’s a threat to capitalism, it’s a threat to patriarchy. So we’ve unlearned what we have always known. We have to rediscover that knowing. So even what Emma just modeled for us, go back, listen to that part of the story again, you’ll hear that description of how she was feeling, where she feels it in her body. Those are the kinds of things we’re talking about here.
Emma Ferris:
And that’s such a beautiful way of putting it, Tori, because that’s a visceral reaction. So the organs are really what’s been hijacked around that autonomic nervous system. So this is our stress response, triggered from the brain, and our frontal lobe doesn’t come into action. That is the bit that we have to come up and upregulate to, when we go through those times of stress. So our body is keeping the score on this. And the thing for me now is, I can feel those sensations and I can sit with them, and they don’t floor me. Where a few months after I would sit and there’d be huge waves of grief, and I had to learn to sit with it to ride it.
Tori Dunlap:
Of course.
Emma Ferris:
So this is the journey too, is to be like, it can feel too much for us to sit in our bodies, so then we have to find ways to do it. So for me, there is multiple tools. And this is why if people go, oh yeah, I’m breathing, I’m already breathing, I’m doing it right. I’m like, yeah, you are breathing, but you might be breathing in a state that is keeping you in that survival state. And it may mean that you aren’t even listening into that gut and bringing yourself into safety. And there’s not a one size fits all. Like the Wim Hof breathing techniques, the fast breaths, they’re great for men, men love them, and some women really thrive off them. But if you’re in anxiety state, you’re already in survival state, you just turn the volume up and it’s not going to make you feel grounded, safe, and connected. So for me, that’s number one. You’ve got to create awareness so you can shift the reaction and then bring on a state of calm.
Then you can release. You can release, which is really powerful. So whether that’s learning to shake the body, whether it’s learning to find your ways to voice, to scream, to sing, to allow things to come through. And then you’ve got to be able to communicate it so that, whether it’s writing, whether it’s burning it, whether it’s talking to your girlfriends about it or your therapist, and then you can shift. That’s when the shift and change happens. We’ve got to break the cycle so that you feel empowered. And I think to me, if that’s what comes out of people listening to the story is like, oh, I could find a different way through, then that makes me feel really good.
Tori Dunlap:
You talk in your work about how stress is actually something we need. And I’ve listened to so many podcasts and done so much research for myself around stress is the caveman response that kept us safe for a very, very long time. But we’re in a constant state of stress now just by an email, not a bear chasing us. So can we talk a little bit about how stress is important, but also what happens when it is just our default state?
Emma Ferris:
Yeah. So there’s this kind of good stress, bad stress, and ugly stress, I like to think of it. So good stress is a challenge response, and that was very much around us shifting into a state of going, when I think of something as good for me, my body is going to release different chemicals in our brain. We still have the flooding experience and the chemistry in the body, so the cortisol and the adrenaline into our blood system. So we still have a physical response. However, the way that we think about it changes the body reaction, and that’s how our brain will actually grow from it. So we have that as that good response. And I think the big thing with it is, you can change that mindset. That’s what the research is shown around it. And as much as you probably go, well, how the heck did you do that with thinking about a con man? That was my mindset shift is like, I’m going to find some good out of this, and that’s my challenge response.
I will find any way to navigate this. Even if it was going through a major grief like divorce. I was like, I’m going to find a way to learn from this, and that becomes the way that I transform out of that state. You’ve got your good stress. Your bad stress is the constant, chronic state, which is kind of what you’re talking about. It’s the day-to-day, the juggle of the workload, the kids, the expectations. They’re like, I’ve got to go to the gym, I’ve got to do the hair, I’ve got to pay the bills. It’s this constant feeling of, I’m being an overload state. And that is where people are unconsciously being hijacked. And they think it’s the normal and then they’re like, I just feel tired, and oh gosh, I’m really anxious, and I’m not sleeping very well. So we have all these warning signs in that state but we are, again, not listening into the fact that that’s not the normal way we should be, and we need to learn tools to regulate it.
The ugly stress is the shock, the trauma, the grief, the illness, the losing the job, all those bits that have suddenly come out of nowhere, and they can really hijack you. And you have to dig deeper at those times to put the tools into action and to have way more self-compassion, which is one of the most important tools. Even though I talk a lot about breath work, self-compassion training is one of the most amazing ways, particularly as females because we’re so hard on ourselves. Society and culturally, we’ve just been driven to just be our own internal bitch basically. And so when we begin to transform that, our nervous system goes into safety mode, because if we are not driving it from this top-down response to be like, that wasn’t good enough, you think that email’s good enough? Look at that person’s looking at you, they’re judging you.
You’re constantly in this mode. So those are the stresses. I look at it and see, you need different things for different situations. Good stress is something that we all can choose. And exercise is good stress, heat stress, cold stress. That’s why we build resilience by having good stress. But we need to know how to tip the bucket out as well, like the emotional, the physical, psychological stress buckets. It’s not just, let’s just sit in the sunshine or have two weeks off a year. You guys in America get two weeks off a year. I’m like, how the hell do you even do that? So you’ve got to be able to find-
Tori Dunlap:
We don’t.
Emma Ferris:
You don’t, right? You need to come to New Zealand, we have four weeks off a year. It’s great. Plus. And it is not good enough. Our society is driving us into a state, these phones that we have, these devices, they’re all triggering this primitive response to be on the go.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you to the advertisers who help keep this podcast free for you to listen to. So when we come back, we’re ending our conversation with a quick practice to guide you through stressful times. See you after the break.
I would love to talk about your breath work a little bit more. But I worked with a coach when I was having a really hard time in my life and it was one of the most transformational things I’ve done, and it is different than relaxation or even then meditation. So can we talk about what breath work is and how we can start to use it in our day-to-day lives, both to deal with these stressful situations, but also to deal with any kind of trauma that we’re facing.
Emma Ferris:
Yeah, it’s a beautiful question. So breath work is, the crux of it, is any exercise or tool that brings awareness around your breath. But again, there isn’t a one tool, there isn’t a one size fits all. And my clinical background as a physiotherapist has been very much around understanding breathing pattern disorders. So this is a much more clinical approach to it. So when I look at people, I have a little wee sixth sense around their breathing patterns. So I’m not trying to read you an oratory, but you can look at where people are and if they’re holding in certain patterns, they will be stuck in a certain style and then they will need different tools because of that. The common patterns we see is this hyperinflated freeze mode, where we’re holding up into our shoulders and our neck, which then leads on to this shorter breathing pattern.
They often experience more headaches, neck pain, jaw pain, and feeling that kind of gripping through the front. And maybe, again, if we’re not able to speak up, so we notice that around the throat, the voice gets wispy or really high because we can’t feel this tension through it. And so the big part is the anatomy of it. So if you don’t understand where your big, beautiful breathing muscle is even sitting, what it does, where it works, and most people don’t, then you are missing out on the right function of it. So we should be breathing 360 degrees, around from our belly button to our lower back. That’s where our diaphragm sits, this big, beautiful muscle. And that’s where 80 to 90% of your work, of your breathing should come from. But what I see, instead of it being like a lower triangle with a base at the bottom of breathing in the diaphragm, people are the opposite, and we’re breathing in our chest.
Yeah, exactly, so that chest is coming up. And it’s probably what you felt when you went first of all looking at this, and that’s that freeze state. So just this awareness around, oh, I’m feeling this way, how do I hold? And then the pathway of going, if this is my pattern, this is the tool. And this may not work, but this is my starting point. So the first thing I get people to do, is usually just to breathe out the mouth just once. And it seems so simple, but just going, ah, dropping down. So you can start to find the baseline, because you’re already, ah, ah, like a balloon, hyperinflated. Yeah, good job. So when we drop it down, then we can start to reset, and then people can begin to use their awareness around their bellies to actually feel that movement. And people start though, and women often go, I don’t want to feel like I’m poking my tummy out.
And you’re like, okay, so you’re not. When you are breathing right, you are breathing all the way into the lower side, and you actually look confident, you look energized, you look healthy. Instead of this gripping tense, which we are all reading people’s body languages all the time. So if you are breathing pattern’s off as well, the mirror neurons in our brain are making others feel stressed. Which is a really fascinating one for me is, with the way that we show up is literally giving each other a language around how I feel and how I look. So if I can change my breathing pattern, I’m allowing others to go, oh, I’m safe with you, let me connect with you, let me work with you. So it’s much more than just your own breathing. And so the question around, well, how do we even bring that in?
First of all, I’m not perfect. I’m not perfect, I’m very brave. That’s the way I look at it, as a mindset. And so I shift my breathing as much as I can through the day because I will get hijacked. To be honest, coming here, Tori, you’re a bit of a superstar. I was like, okay, this is going to be big, talking to her, how am I going to feel about this? So I did a few breaths, I did a little bit of a shake out, and I was like, it’s going to be fine. But that’s the thing, is you put it into action, you put it into every day, and you begin to notice this reaction between when you are triggered and when you respond. And while that’s actually, when you’re in a stress state, time actually, it changes. It’s not like a linear space, you kind of feel like this goes faster, it goes slower. But what’s important is you then shift and it’s the recovery. Okay. We’re all going to get hijacked, we’re human. How we recover is the magic.
Tori Dunlap:
And as someone who works with my coach for, gosh, a year and a half maybe, even almost two years, it has transformed every part of my life, both in the way I respond to stress and to emotions and to regulating my own stress and emotions. But also, it’s made my workouts better, because as you’re lifting weights or you’re running or your cardio is high, your heartbeat’s going, it’s like I can calm my breathing, which helps immediately settle my body into whatever exercise I’m doing, as opposed to getting all worked up in that moment. So it’s been so helpful for me in every aspect of my life.
Emma Ferris:
I appreciate you saying that, because coaching for me is one of the most amazing experiences, to see a woman take control of their life. And it’s interesting when you start that coaching process, and you probably found that too, is how, like you said, it flowed into all aspects. You start with some breath work, but you’re actually looking at the way that you’re feeling safe and what that shows up for you. How is your mind actually impacting what you’re doing and your thoughts and your connection with everything else? And I think when I’ve seen people, women particularly, step into that power, it shifts their relationship sometimes for what they didn’t expect. It means they go, actually, this is not serving me, this is not serving me, and same thing for their business, their business goes different directions because they’re like, wow, I feel so much more aware, confident, and clear.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. And for me it was, I’m such a cerebral person, and yet I also have a really good gut impulse. And so the big transformation for me was understanding just how much the brain and the body is connected. And I like to describe it through the example of, when you stub your toe, often the tears will well up before your brain has even had the, I’m in pain in this hurts and I’m going to cry. It’s just an immediate reaction. And often when I would have an emotional reaction, I would then try to analyze why it was happening. Why am I crying? Why am I angry? What’s going on? And I wouldn’t ask my body what was going on. It was all just like, what am I feeling or thinking?
And so that was, even just that example, was so impactful for me to realize that sometimes I have emotional reactions to something physical, and sometimes I have physical reactions to something emotional. And it doesn’t always have to be, I’m thinking or feeling a certain way. Sometimes it’s just, I’m having, my body has pent-up energy that needs to get released some way. And so we have to cry. Okay, great, that’s what’s happening.
Emma Ferris:
That’s what’s happening. And that to me is also around the leadership. So one of the things that I’ve seen, you talk about the gut and the head, one of the third things is the heart, and this is the embodied cognition. That again, most of us as women, we are so heart led and aware that we often shut it down again. And this is where we don’t listen into those feelings and emotions. And what I’ve seen is, the more that we sit in this place of healing through experiences, if we can use self-compassion and heart connection. And the science and research is really fascinating around this. If you look at Dr. Kristin Neff’s work, Fierce Self-Compassion is a really great book to start.
But she’s done 20 years of research on compassion practices and self-compassion. And the amazing thing is, you could be practicing compassion, so it could be a very simple phrase in your mind, no wonder I feel this way, others feel just like me. Or sitting beside somebody in a train and thinking in your mind, just like me, this person wants to be happy and doesn’t know how. And your body will regulate, and the person beside you a few minutes later will regulate with you. That’s the crazy thing, is we are regulating without a language. But you’ve got to shift it. And so that’s the difference between the gut and the head, it’s the heart.
And I often use that technique in a lot of my workshops or my coaching and my retreats, is asking questions to each part of you. So your head, your heart, and your gut. And you’ll get very different answers. Often the head is like, I got to do, I got a be going. The heart is like, I’m loving, I miss this, I want this. And the gut is like, I just want calm, I want relaxation, I want safety. So funny how it has the layers. And people are like, what? This is all going on inside me? I’m like, yep. Are you listening? Are you listening?
Tori Dunlap:
Emma, my last question for you. How do you view the world differently before you were conned to after you were conned?
Emma Ferris:
Whoa. I think from a point of my own internal beliefs, first of all, is I’ve let go of my fear around financial security, because that was the least financial secure I’ve ever been. I think I have a lens of, look, observe before I trust, which kind of feels a bit sad in some ways, but that’s actually a good thing. This is around us and our safety as women. From a world lens, I feel for so many of the women out there that don’t get the support, the resources and the need for it. But I also know that things like this podcast is also a resource, and people can go out and find ways to empower themselves. And I feel like there’s so much more work we need to do as women to rise each other up instead of knock each other down, to actually be in a space where we help and support. And that’s going to take lot of time still, for us to get into a space where that’s okay.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for sharing your story. I want to fucking punch his face in. I’m so sorry that happened to you, that’s so stupid. But I’m so thankful you’re telling it and so thankful that you are doing the work that you’re doing because it’s so important. Where can people find out more about your work and you?
Emma Ferris:
Thank you for that. I’d love talking to you in the first place. The podcast, Conning the Con Podcast. Conning the Con. We have had over 2 million downloads, it might be almost 3 now because of this story. Well, first of all, she’s crazy, so have a listen there. And then my second podcast, The Bravery Academy has been a labor of love, which is sharing stories around the world with scientists, with people that have had amazing brave stories, from hurricanes, to being through school shootings, to being double amputees. An amazing story of a guy in New York. So The Bravery Academy is going to help resource people as well after that. And The Breath Effect, so thebreatheffect.com is my website and it’s also my Facebook and Instagram. And I really love to connect with people and hear how they’re going on their journey. And there’s lots of ways that you can work with me, whether it’s courses, retreats in Bali, or online with coaching. So yeah, love to hear from anybody that’s listening into the podcast.
Tori Dunlap:
Amazing. Thank you so much.
Emma Ferris:
Thank you, Tori.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you so much to Emma for joining us and sharing that incredibly vulnerable story, but also a story of resilience and power when she regained her life and took her power back. You can learn more about Emma and her work at thebreatheffect.com. You can also check out her podcast, Conning the Con and The Bravery Academy, wherever you are listening right now. Thank you as always, financial feminist. Will you do me a favor before you go? If you love the show, if you’ve gotten benefits out of, not just this episode, but maybe previous episodes too, will you just rate the podcast five stars? You can do that very easily, you can just go to Spotify, Apple, wherever you’re listening right now, tap the little rating, tap at five stars. You can leave a review if you want, that’s written. These help us more than you know, it allows other people to discover the show. It’s completely free for you to listen to, as you know.
And we appreciate your little small acts of kindness that keep feminist media able to keep producing stuff when it’s really, really hard right now. So hit that five star review, we really appreciate it. And if you want bonus points, share this episode, especially with someone who loves true crime. I already know a couple people I’m going to be sharing this episode with. Thank you so much, as always. Thank you for your support. Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you back here soon.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First 100K Podcast. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First 100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
