Ashley Lemieux: Rewire Your Mindset, Heal From Grief and Trauma, and Start Again | Mental Health | YAPClassic

Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha: Entrepreneurship and Self-Improvement Podcast

Ashley Lemieux shares her profound journey of navigating extreme personal loss, including a contested adoption and the death of her newborn

Key takeaways

• Ashley Lemieaux uses 'Clarity Mapping' via five daily questions to rebuild her sense of purpose.
• Entrepreneurs often use work as a maladaptive coping mechanism to avoid processing grief.

Main topics

• Grief and Trauma Recovery
• Entrepreneurial Pivots

Notable quotes

You're not starting over. You can't. You have so much knowledge now...

Conclusion

A powerful lesson on using resilience and intentionality to transform

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) We experienced a very unexpected contested adoption and we ended up losing the kids. The lack of purpose that I felt in my life is something that made it really hard for me to get out of bed in the morning. Until I got to the point where I was like, I have to figure out what my intention for my life is now. And so I started with one simple question every single morning. And that question was, so... That's when the concept of clarity mapping really started. How did you get over the shame of starting a company and shutting Speaker 2 (0:35) it down? We Speaker 1 (0:36) get scared of this idea of starting over, but you're not starting over. You can't. You have so much knowledge now, and so you get to now apply all of that into the next thing. Do you feel like entrepreneurs deal with grief and stress differently than other people? Something that is very common among entrepreneurs is Speaker 2 (0:59) Yap gang, if you've ever struggled with grief, loss, trauma, or just felt completely stuck in life, today's Yap Classic is going to really resonate with you. Our guest today is Ashley Lemoy. She's the founder and CEO of The Shine Project, bestselling author, and the host of the Healing Her podcast. Ashley is an expert on grief and trauma recovery, and she's devoted her life to helping others reignite the light within themselves. In this conversation, Ashley shows us how to move through some of life's darkest moments and Speaker 1 (1:30) find Speaker 2 (1:31) a way forward again. So whether you're going through something right now or just want to be more mentally prepared for the future, I hope you find this conversation with Ashley valuable. Ashley, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Speaker 1 (1:44) Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, thanks for joining me today. So I'm going to just Speaker 2 (1:49) jump right into it. For a lot of us entrepreneurs, our businesses grow out of something that we've struggled with in our own lives. And I feel like this has been especially the case for you. You've had a bunch of dark moments in your life. So why don't we start off with the first one that I learned about when I was researching your story. It was in your 20s. You unexpectedly became the mother of two children. And then you had some traumatic experiences around that. Can you tell us what happened? Yeah. Speaker 1 (2:17) So in our mid-20s, I was actually building my first company also. We were newly married and we didn't have kids at all in our radar at that time. And overnight we became... permanent guardians of two kids. And for the next four years, we were a family in every sense of the word. And everything that we did revolved around raising the kids, giving them the opportunities that we, you know, as a parent, you want them to have. And all of us were under the impression that we would be together forever, for always. And during the final steps of the adoption process, we experienced a very unexpected contested Speaker 2 (3:02) adoption. And Speaker 1 (3:04) during that time, we ended up being in court for two years. I just remember the life inside of me. It felt like someone had taken a vacuum and just sucked it all out. We were in court all the time, depositions, high stress. No one knew what was going to happen. And we ended up losing the kids. I was actually on the other side of the country for work and it happened fast. I didn't even get to come home and say goodbye to them. And that was almost eight years ago now. And it rocked our world in a way that I did not know how to come back from or if I even wanted to figure out. how to come back from it, to be honest. And Speaker 2 (3:54) so can you help us understand like how you ended up with these kids in your 20s? And then are they now back in your family or the court took them away and you just never saw them again? Speaker 1 (4:05) Yeah, so there's parts of our story that we just don't share all the full details of, but they were placed with us through someone we knew and we have not had contact with them since. since we lost them almost eight years ago. I'm so sorry to hear that. And I know Speaker 2 (4:24) that you guys decided to move after this happened. What did that teach you about grief when you decided to move? Were you able to run away from your grief? I wanted to. We were Speaker 1 (4:36) like, okay, what can we do that will help us not feel this hell, this weight that... feels like it has buried every aspect of our life. And it was really hard to be in the home that we had raised the kids in. All of our friends were friends because our kids were friends from school. We were doing things in the community all together or sports teams and whatever. And my husband and I were like, if there's any shot of us making it after this, we got to get away for a little while. We ended up moving to Nashville, Tennessee. I actually had had some employees there and everything about Nashville is very different than it is in Phoenix. And so we just said, peace out, let's go. But then once we got to Nashville and settled in the adrenaline, you know, of a new city, of new opportunities, of the excitement of, okay, what are we going to explore? What is waiting for us here? Once that started to kind of wear off and the grief was still there. We were then like, okay, how much farther can we run? So we actually ended up packing carry-on suitcases and we went to Europe with pretty much no plans for almost two months, hoping maybe that that would help ease the pain in that acute stage of grief when everything is just new and raw and you don't know how to take your next breath. Again, after a while, that wore off. And so we found ourselves really having to dig deep of answering the questions. What is it that we want from our lives now? And how do we rebuild so that we can participate in our life and not? regret not living Speaker 2 (6:22) it because we were too sad. And I know we're going to touch on this much deeper later, but you talk about this concept in your book called clarity mapping. So was this one of the first instances of you starting to get clarity around your life and what Speaker 1 (6:34) you wanted? Yeah. So what was really hard for me, and I think a lot of people can relate to this. in whatever role you are in, let's say you identify with your role of motherhood or as a wife or a partner or your role at work or whatever that thing is that really shapes your identity. If that is taken away from you and is no longer a part of your daily world, you don't have to base your decisions around it anymore. Your actions aren't based off of doing that thing because it is gone. The lack of purpose that I felt in my life, no longer being a physical mother, is something that made it really hard for me to get out of bed in the morning. I didn't know how to focus my time and my energy anymore. It didn't matter at that point because my business was running. You know, it was okay for me to step away for a little bit. It did not matter if I got out of bed or not. There was no one I needed to feed breakfast to or to get to school or to bathe at night or to tuck in. And I had to, so I stayed in bed for a long time until I got to the point where I was like, I have to figure out what my intention for my life is now. And so I started with one simple question every single morning. And that question was, what is my intention today? Because today, right now in this moment, was all I could focus on. So that's when the concept of clarity mapping really started. I became a series of five questions that I answered every single day to help give me purpose and direction and clarity. on who I was and what it is that I wanted to be rebuilding so that I could create tangible steps forward to start building that thing. And Speaker 2 (8:33) one of those tangible steps was that you decided to have your own children. And so you and your husband started to try for a baby and that led to another traumatic experience. Are you comfortable to share that with us? Speaker 1 (8:46) Yeah, we waited probably about, I think it was about, four years after the loss of the older two kiddos to feel like we were at a place where we were ready to continue to try to grow our family. I didn't want to go back into motherhood feeling as broken as I felt because I knew that that would impact the next child that we were to bring into our family. And I had so much healing that I needed to do in order to be ready for that. So We were so intentional about what the next steps of growing our family look like. And we decided the end of 2019 that it was time to grow our family. So that is when we moved from Nashville back to Phoenix. We were like, okay, we're ready to go back home. We want to be by my family. We want solid roots there so that, you know, when we have more kids, we're close to family and they get that experience of growing up around cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. So we moved home and right when we moved home, we found out that we were pregnant. And obviously we were so excited. And it just felt like for the first time in several years that there was this new breath of life being breathed into our lives again and that there was forward movement and the grief was still there, but also now there was joy and hope. And an opportunity to keep living our lives, right? And I know no one likes to talk about this time, but I feel like 2020 was a great equalizer for all of us because we can say 2020 and everyone's like, yeah, that year freaking sucked for me, right? And it sucked for all of us for various reasons. And for us, we moved into our home in March of 2020, the same week that the pandemic had shut everything down. And so that also means... meant that doctors appointments when you were pregnant, everything kind of changed. And so it kind of felt scary for a moment to leave the house being pregnant. I got really sick one day and we couldn't figure out what was wrong because I had felt fine. But then by the end of the night, I was screaming in pain. I couldn't get out of bed. I spiked a fever. I'd never felt anything like that. So my husband. called the ambulance. They took me to the hospital and immediately they checked the baby. Baby was okay. And I'm like, okay, I can get through anything if baby, if my baby's okay. And we found out that I had gone septic. I didn't really know what that meant, but I now know sepsis is a blood infection. So whatever infection you have enters your bloodstream and it started causing kidney failure for me. So that had to be treated. immediately because it's very life-threatening. And in that moment, they told us you're going to be admitted to the hospital for an indefinite amount of time. But today's also the first day that we are shutting down outside visitors. So your husband cannot come with you. You're going to have to come by yourself. And I just remember feeling that was the loneliest. loneliest I think I have ever felt. And I remember being wheeled back, just like sobbing, saying goodbye to my husband, neither of us knowing what was going to happen. Later the next day, there was a moment where they called a code or a rapid response, which means like a whole team of doctors was surrounding me because I was really struggling breathing and everything felt like every, all the pain had just spiked. And I remember looking at a tech who was giving a scan on my heart, an EKG, and I remember asking him, am I going to die right now? Because I felt like I was going to. And I knew that whatever was happening in my body, there was no way it was going to keep me and my baby alive. Like I just felt it in my gut that something was drastically changing right then. So after I was stable, a couple hours later, I had them. give me another ultrasound. And that's when they found out that we had lost our baby, our baby boy. And I ended up delivering him alone the next morning. And it sent me again into this part of life where you're like, well, I thought that we had gone through the hard thing, right? Like I thought that this was our first step back of trusting life again. And now What am I supposed to do? And so that entered the next journey of really finding clarity again in my life for what does this look like now to move forward. Speaker 2 (13:41) For other people who are in the moment feeling like really stuck that they. They've gone through a lot of pain. They had a lot of traumatic experience, maybe a loss. What advice do you have for them in terms of like the steps to take next? I think this is such a good question Speaker 1 (13:57) because when we are in those moments, it really feels like we're the only one in those moments. Grief and trauma can feel so isolating. And so the very first thing that I would say is that I'm so sorry. And I want you to be able to know that. what you've been through, it can't be fixed. It's not supposed to be fixed. There's not a band-aid that can be put on it. I think that there's platitudes that people like to say, like everything happens for a reason or time heals all wounds. And I'm going to be the first one to say that none of those things are true. And so it's okay to feel exactly how you feel. The one thing that we know about grief and trauma is that most people spend their entire lives avoiding the reality of the pain. And the one thing that if all of us did in this area of our life where we feel grief, that would change the trajectory of what we're able to do next is acknowledgement. We have to acknowledge what we've been through and also what it feels like inside of us. And it might sound so simple to say that, but Having it be simple doesn't mean it's easy, which is why the majority of people never get to this place where they're able to acknowledge it. So if we can start there, then that allows us to have more freedom in acknowledging what has happened and the hurt it has caused us so that we can stop avoiding it and then create a plan that feels safe for us to heal. And to be able to experience the world again in a way that feels safe so that we can create forward steps. Speaker 2 (15:42) And I know that for you, you've shared your story on podcasts like this, on your own podcast. You wrote a memoir. How did actually sharing, like you were just alluding to it now, how did actually sharing your story help you heal? I think that for so Speaker 1 (15:57) many of us, we carry these stories. Sometimes there's... shame attached to it. Sometimes there's so much pain attached to it. But what we know is that when our pain can leave our bodies, whether it's writing our story down and no one else even reads it, we know that that helps facilitate healing. So many of us suffer in darkness and our stories just need to be brought to light, to be acknowledged, to be received, to be validated. And as I've been able to share my story has been so beautiful. And I think is the greatest privilege of the work that I do is that it helps give other people permission to share and acknowledge their stories. So I get so many stories sent to me by other women who have gone through really hard things who are like, I've seen your story and