What Emotional Healing Really Looks Like After Grief and Loss with Melissa Saleh

Have you ever experienced a loss so deep it changed everything?
What if healing isn’t about moving on, but about learning to live differently with your grief?

In this episode, I talk with Melissa Saleh, a trauma advocate, storyteller, and mother who shares her powerful journey through stillbirth grief and how she found her way back to life after everything crumbled beneath her. Following the loss of her daughter during labor, Melissa's world fell apart. What followed was a raw, authentic, and deeply human path through grief and loss, identity, and eventual emotional healing.

We explore how she used alternative healing methods, somatic practices, and nervous system regulation to begin rebuilding her life. We also discuss why PTSD recovery isn’t one-size-fits-all, and how true emotional resilience often begins in the quiet moments of surrender and self-care.

You’ll learn:

• Why stillbirth grief is so often misunderstood and minimized
• How grief and loss impact the body, mind, and spirit
• Ways to support emotional healing using somatic practices and daily rituals
• What Melissa discovered about the limits of traditional PTSD recovery and the power of alternative healing
• How to reclaim identity, purpose, and joy in life after loss

If you’ve experienced deep loss or love someone who has, this episode offers comfort, insight, and hope.

You’re not alone in your healing.

Much love,

Laurie

Free Guides

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Click here to fill out my questionnaire

Click here for my FREE “Beginner’s Guide to Somatic Healing”

Click here for my FREE Core Values Exercise

Click here to purchase my book: Sandwiched: A Memoir of Holding On and Letting Go

Website

Melissa Saleh

Watch out for her upcoming book: A Story of Transcendence Over Unspeakable Trauma

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DISCLAIMER: THE COMMENTARY AND OPINIONS AVAILABLE ON THIS PODCAST ARE FOR INFORMATIONAL AND ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY AND NOT FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROVIDING LEGAL, MEDICAL OR PROFESSIONAL ADVICE. YOU SHOULD CONTACT A LICENSED THERAPIST IF YOU ARE EXPERIENCING SUICIDAL THOUGHTS. YOU SHOULD CONTACT AN ATTORNEY IN YOUR STATE TO OBTAIN LEGAL ADVICE. YOU SHOULD CONTACT A LICENSED MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL WITH RESPECT TO ANY MEDICAL ISSUE OR PROBLEM.

Transcript

0:02

Welcome back, Freebirds. Before we begin this episode, I wanted to inform you that we are going to be discussing a very sensitive topic of losing a child, either before or during birth. So if this is something that will affect you emotionally, maybe not listen to it. This is a subject that is close to my heart. As my adopted mother experienced such a loss before adopting me, and we never discussed it. I only discussed it with my dad and confirmed it with my mom's best friend. It's so often these topics are taboo subjects, but I believe it's important to bring it into the light. And I hope you find this meaningful conversation with Melissa Silva insightful and comforting. And I hope by sharing this conversation, it helps you heal a similar experience where it gives you the courage to share a story that you've been holding on to. Welcome to confessions of a Free Bird podcast. I'm your host, Marie James, a mother, divorce, a recovering caregiver, the author of sandwiched, a memoir of Holding On and Letting Go, a therapy junkie, relationship coach, Somatic Healer, and now podcaster. I'm a free spirit and here to lift you up. On this podcast, I'll share soulful confessions and empowering conversations with influential experts so you can learn to spread your wings and make the most of your second half. So pop in those earbuds, turn up the volume, and let's get inspired, because my mission is to help you create your most joyful, purpose driven life one confession at a time. Welcome back Freebirds! Today I have a very special guest. Her name is Melissa Slay and she is a former lawyer, journalist turned serial entrepreneur, storyteller, and advocate for survivors of trauma. With a career spanning technology, media, and brand strategy, she has shaped the narratives of fortune 500 companies startups, helping them carve out their place in a fast paced world. About ten years ago, Melissa lost a baby during labor and that day changed everything she knew about life, this world and her place in it. And one of the reasons why I wanted to have Melissa on as one of my confessions is that my adoptive mom lost her baby at eight months along. I always knew it, but that was a conversation that I was not able to have with her. It was a conversation that I had with my dad, who was not very emotionally available. So that was surprising. And some of her closest friends, I just thought that this is such an important topic as women, even though many of you listeners are in midlife. If you've ever lost a baby or know somebody who has lost a baby, especially for us women, I think it's one of, if not the hardest experiences I could imagine having. And I haven't had that. But I think so many of us know somebody who has. And so, Melissa, thank you so much for being here and for sharing your story with us today. Thank you so much for having me and for shining a light on this on this topic. Yeah. Can you start with telling us what you're comfortable sharing about what that birth experience that you had when you lost your child? Yes. I always describe it as my life has a book and an ad there was before that day, and then after that day and everything about me before that is very different than everything about after that day. I will say there is beauty even in the most horrific experiences, and I see that now. But the pain is absolutely enormous. And any woman who goes through something like this, there are so many different levels of Pain and of loss on physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, societal and soul level. For me, I was almost nine months pregnant, I had my own company, and I was living this life in my mid 30s in New York City, and I had gone in for a scan 48 hours earlier and been told, yeah, everything looks normal. I went into labor in my apartment in Brooklyn on Thursday night. I labored in the bathtub with my labor timer that tells you how far apart your contractions are, and in the morning things were clearly progressing. So I got in the back of a cab alone because my marriage at that time was not in a great place. We were still married and still together, but things were rocky and I went to the hospital and my doctors examined me and informed to me, you're going to have a baby today. You're in full labor. And then they listened for her heartbeat and then informed there is no heartbeat. Your daughter has just passed. There was nothing to do about it. There was no opportunity to say goodbye. There was no opportunity to do anything. It had happened. No one knew why. There was no clear reason ever. And I was then told, you must continue with labor and give birth, or else your life could be at risk as well. And the events of that day, the best analogy I can use is if you take a bottle and you drop it from a five storey window, what does it look like when it falls? And that is what my, my soul looked like after that day. Yeah. Shattered. Absolutely shattered. I also throughout the course of that day realized events happened that are all explained in the book. But there were some really clear betrayals when you have such a horrific tragedy so suddenly it shakes up your entire life. It shakes up your entire world. And after that day, it was very clear to me my marriage would end. I just didn't know when. And it was also clear to me I would have to leave New York City. Some things happened that day where I just said, the city has turned on me. The city has betrayed me. After that, I would love to say that I then started the healing journey. But no, it took another year and a half for things to systematically fall down around me. To the. Point where I went to zero. I lost the marriage. I lost the company that I had founded, most of my friends, my professional reputation. I wound up giving away most. Of my. Belongings on a Brooklyn stoop with a sign that said Free Stuff and I. After over 13 years of living in New York and building a life there, I drove out of the city at 6 a.m. in a beautiful Volvo sedan and said, never, you know, goodbye to all that pain and started over from scratch. I want to say that a loss like this. Is. So unbelievably cleaving. To the soul. Shattering to the soul, because first of all, you lose a baby that is not yet been born. So you lose a part of yourself. A part of you dies. Yeah, yeah. And and a future that you envisioned of being of a mother just from that standpoint. Never mind all the hormonal changes. Postpartum, all of it. And any woman who goes through this, your soul really does get put through a meat grinder. Well, let's get into society's reaction to it. The sense of guilt and shame that women are just freely made to feel are allowed to feel the taboo nature of these kinds of losses. They are incredibly common. But Western medicine does not have an explanation for many, if not all of them. Sometimes there is an explanation that was a cord accident. Those are horrific losses as well. But for the ones with no explanation of which there are many. Yeah, but Western medicine does not know is very vast. And when you go experience like that, you have to confront the limits of Western medicine. Right. Well, and we assume that you're a doctor, you're supposed to know, but then you don't. So I'd love to go back to if you're comfortable. You talked about how society responds. What was the reaction that you received from a lot of people that you encountered? Well, at first. Look. It, very few people are evil people. Very few people. Why aren't you when you have gone through a tragedy like this? That being said, our society is pretty notoriously awful at handling tragedies like this. We do not like to talk about grief and pain, and we would prefer to just sprinkle it with, oh, no grit and resilience and be a strong woman and get over it and stiff upper lip and move on. Yeah, no, that does not work. It certainly didn't work for me after a loss like. This at. First, of course people stop and they want to help. They don't know what to say and they don't know what to do. A bomb has just gone off on your life. It's just your life. The bomb really has not spread to anyone else. I don't mean disrespect to fathers, I don't mean disrespect to families. But it is not the same. I was her, I am her mother. I grew. This baby. I created this baby. And I am the only one who knew her, for lack of a better word. Right. You're attached to her, right? And as a somatic experiencing practitioner, your nervous systems were connected. She is a part of you. She was a part of you for nine months. Yes. And then she has died. And, I mean, you can go down many spiritual conversations, physiological conversations about what kind of death that is and what kind of impact that has on a person that's never even been explained or even touched upon. But society, look, people will show up to help for a short period of time, and then the sense of, oh, man, everybody stops to watch the car crash and then they move on. There's much that sense when you are in that position, like, okay, they're tired of us. They don't want to hear about it anymore. Yeah. Like yeah. And over it. There are over it. So get over it. Why are you still upset about this? It's been a year. I'm sorry. What? My son lost on the ground a year. A year is nothing. It's nothing like I might still be feeling this way in 20 years. No, exactly. Will I ever. It's not like getting a broken leg. You're in pain. And then you're in a cast. And in eight weeks, you get the cast off and you're healed. This is not like that. Will you ever feel it? No one can guarantee you. Oh, you will ever feel better. It is up to you now. This this entire life has become a very different canvas. And the people around you also. This is a very taboo topic in a society where taboos are sort of being unearthed right and left. Somehow this remains a very taboo topic. So people don't want to hear about it. They're afraid of it. Why do you think that is? So I've had women tell me you're the worst case scenario you become. Everyone's nightmare. You become everyone's greatest nightmare. And then people do this sort of mental jujitsu where they start to differentiate you from them so that they don't have to deal with the fear of it happening to them. Oh well, she must of blah blah blah. She must have done something which. Is their own fear that they're projecting on you. But in turn then that ends up alienates you, and then you end up feeling rejected. There's a Nigerian proverb that I think is so wise that honestly, I think explains a lot of American society right now. A child who is ejected from the village will burn it down just to feel its warmth. And when you are a woman who has had this kind of loss and people are turning on you right and left, yeah, I don't know if we want you at this party or yeah, you can come to this party, but like, don't mention your baby. Who, you know, that sort of thing where you're so invalidated and then you're so sort of like put in a box and you just become this symbol of tragedy and something that other people don't want to be reminded of. And that can intensify the trauma tenfold. Because when you need your community most, your community can turn on you. Not everyone's community does that. But my community did. Yeah. And I'm so incredibly sorry that that happened to you. It feels like when you're down and you get kicked, like, okay, here I'm down and now I'm getting. Kicked. Exactly right. And there are no evil people here. No one is bad. No one is intentionally trying to hurt the woman grieving for her baby. However, there was not for me and I know I'm not the only one. Communal sense of real support and rallying. And there's also, quite frankly, the hole that I found myself in was a horrible dark hole. And like I said, it took me another year and a half to hit rock bottom. Almost two years to hit rock bottom, because I told myself after this loss, the only thing that even remotely begin to heal me is having another baby. The only thing that could even begin to put my soul back together. Now, whenever you put. All of your hopes onto. One thing, it's not advisable. I wouldn't hear anything else back then. I just wouldn't. And so every single thing that I did for the next year and a half was focused on having it. I'm just going to have another baby. And then everything could fall apart. But I will have my baby. And I'm not saying that that was the best course of action. I held the marriage together with duct tape. I held my company together. My New York life together. And I did get pregnant again. And it did force me to get out of depression, get off medication, get healthy again. All because I was so motivated, because I wanted to be healthy enough to get pregnant again. I got pregnant again about a year and a half later, and then in the second trimester, I went to my new doctors for the genetic screening. My first child, my daughter, who passed, had been genetically healthy. She had been completely biologically, physiologically normal, except for the fact that her heart had inexplicably stopped during labor. This time I'm in the second trimester and the doctors informed me this baby has severe genetic abnormality and will likely not survive birth. So I had to face another horrific loss. And when that happened, that was just sort of me and God. There is nothing here for me. There is only going forward. There's only saying goodbye to this life and moving forward into the unknown. That was what I did and that set me off on the journey of trauma, transcendence, which I am writing the book about. And it was absolutely extraordinary journey. And it took almost two years, a year and a half for the second pregnancy to happen, and then almost two, almost two years for me to fully exit New York and let everything fully go to zero. Well, grief is so often in our society like you talked about, we brush grief aside. Oh, it's been a year. Get over it. Why are you still talking about this? And grief is something so deep inside of us. It's a form of trauma. So a very simple definition of trauma from a somatic place is too much, too soon, too much, too fast, too much for too long or too little for too long. Right. So I think your experience probably covers a little bit of all. Of those things. Unfortunately. And really to. Yeah. And when we don't allow ourselves to really sit with our emotions, which again, our society does not typically encourage, they encourage us to live from our neck up. And unless we're really feeling our emotions and allowing them to emerge, experiencing me expressing them and expelling them become the forces that grief is going to stay with you longer and longer. That's exactly right. If you face it, it will dissipate. If you don't think it's going to be in the background running your life for the rest of your life. And that was what I realized. Hold on. That is really profound. I want you to say that again. If you do not face it, it will be in the background running your life for the rest of your life. And I learned that very acutely. My trauma was intense. I developed PTSD after this loss. I was also married to a man who was suffering from alcoholism. So that was horrific. While I was grieving. So that was additional drama. Then there was another loss that was additional trauma. There was learning on the day of my daughter's loss that my grandmother had had an almost identical loss. She lost her first child at birth. My family had buried it. I didn't learn about it until I was in the hospital, having just lost my first. So that additional level of trauma, as you say, too much, too soon and then not enough. I mean, all of all of the above. I liken it to a snake. That one's around your nervous system and it doesn't go away. It will run the show. You it will run you. Like a puppet. I mean, when you said that what I envision is like a boa constrictor just right. Because that's what we feel. We feel this constriction inside, and it's like a boa constrictor just coming in and constricting you from the inside out. And until you make friends with that snake, that boa constrictor, and understand why it's there and what it wants to teach you, it's going to stay there. That's right. And my boa constrictor, I am PTSD free now. I am very proud of that. No Western medical doctor told me will be PTSD. They told me you'll be on medication for the rest of your life. I take no medication and I am free of PTSD. Now, does that mean that everything is free and dandy and wonderful? Of course not. I liken it to an addiction where somebody who is addicted, if they are not caring, someone who has beat an addiction, if they are not careful, they can fall off the wagon. It hurts. Yeah. So you beat PTSD. You still have to maintain a very high level of self-care, of emotional work to keep symptoms of PTSD from coming back, especially I now m the mother of two healthy young daughters and regularly thank you, which was considered a medical miracle. I was 35 years old when I lost my first daughter. I had these babies during the pandemic in my early 40s. I had 42 and 43 with no medical assistance, no fertility assistance. I had them in hospitals, but I did not have any kind of fertility assistance whatsoever. That was considered a medical miracle. You can call whatever you want, but it is the result of trauma, transcendence, and all the work that I have done to overcome. Trauma because it also it taught. Me so much. I had to become an expert in myself, my own physiology, my own body. What do I need for nutrition? What do I need for exercise? How does my body function optimally? And once I knew that, it became remarkably easy to get pregnant, it happened twice in two years in my 40s. Well, because if you're tending to yourself and you're taking care of your own needs and developing that relationship with yourself from a nervous system standpoint, then you are regulating your nervous system from the food you're eating, from taking care of yourself from an exercise standpoint, taking care of your emotions. And when you do all that, your nervous system is regulated and your autonomic nervous system is like the operating system of our whole entire body, our thoughts or feelings, our beliefs and everything. And when you are regulated and living a life that is true to you, or as true as truest as it can be at any given moment, then your body is going to work the way it's supposed to. Well, you are exactly right. And that is what happened. And after huge fertility struggles in my 30s, because it took me years and several miscarriages to get pregnant with my first daughter, everything just it. Was like. I had my first child in October of 2020, and then six months later. Honey, whatever it was, it was literally like, I mean. That's the thing. I guess that's the good news to warn everyone is once you really do get everything aligned. Get ready, because it's all coming. Right? You ready for finally having everything you want? Which is a whole nother, whole nother story. So you talk about packing everything up in your 1992 Volvo and driving out of New York, and you created this new life for you, for yourself. And you delve into self. Can you walk us through some of, like, maybe the bigger steps or the transformational steps that really helped you talk about transcendence? What were those bigger moments for you? The pivotal moments that really helped you become who you are today? Absolutely. Well, the key to just. Ground Zero for healing was getting out of New York and landing in Charleston, South Carolina. I was very fortunate to hit rock bottom, owning a house. Because if you when you hit rock bottom, you are you are so vulnerable in this society and you need a place to land. And if you don't, a lot of people wind up living in their cars. They wind up on the street. I work with homeless organizations and so many people had I not own this house, which I owned this house because I had, saved up money to purchase an apartment in Brooklyn that I then sold. And some of that money also was my grandmother. And the grandmother who lost her first worked for the government. She was one of the creators of the Head Start program, which helps low income children. And she sucked away her government salary and her government pension. And she left enough to me and my sister, which I now see. There's no way my grandmother could have known that the trauma would carry on to me, but she knew that there was going to be something that happened in our lives. I really she knew. And she left this money. And then I saved up and I bought an apartment for myself in Brooklyn. And then I got married to my first husband, and I sold that apartment. And after the loss, we created this plan. It wasn't a great well thought out plan, but it was all we had. We'll have our miracle, our second miracle baby, and we'll move to this house in Charleston, South Carolina and just start life over. Well, there was no marriage and there was no miracle baby. So I land at this house alone. And on the one hand, the grief of that was so crushing. But on the other hand, I finally had the. Space. And the time to take a breath and assess. Charleston, South Carolina is a beautiful and deeply spiritual place. It is also, I always say this. This is a place of deep polarity. Just like any American city. Charleston, South Carolina, was the home, the sort of nexus of the American slave trade. Those who docked at the Charleston market and marched people off of those ships to sell them. So you cannot deny the darkness of the history of this place, and how much division and unresolved pain still exists. Also, it is a very beautiful, very spiritually enriching place. It holds this duality of the beauty and the horror and the nights were so crushing, the sun would go down and I would just be faced. With. Complete darkness and complete unknown. All the trauma from the past, all the unknowns from the future. And all I had was a box of my daughter's ashes that I kept in what would have been the nursery because I just couldn't part with it yet. So Charleston is a bit like, a mini Manhattan. It's peninsula, so you can walk the whole thing. So I would just walk. It's pretty safe. Safer than walking around New York at night. So I would just walk. And the moment that I knew one night, there's going to be a journey here and there is actually a future for me. I was walking through the French Quarter, very beautiful part of the city, and there's a historic church and there are graveyards interspersed throughout the city. You'll be walking along, you'll come out of a restaurant, and there's a graveyard with graves from the 1700s, 1800s, etc. and there were some tourists outside the graveyard adjacent to this church, and they had pictures and they were taking photos, and I was like, there's got to be some ghost tour. You know, Charleston is big on these kinds of ghost tours. And I asked someone, oh, what do you know, what are you guys looking at? And they said, oh, it's the woman and her baby. And I was like, what? And I ran home, not ran, but I walked very quickly home. It's very hot in Charleston. And I got on Google. Sure enough, it was on Google. There is a woman named Sue Hardy who in 1888, I lost her baby at birth, and she died six days later. And they're both buried in this. And it is said that on the anniversary of the baby's death, which is in June. So it was several months after June. But still it is said that on the anniversary of the baby's death, she appears her ghost appears to visit her daughter's or baby's grave. And there are pictures on the internet of this ghost. I have no idea. Let me fully say it. Yeah, yeah. There's a real. I have no idea if there is a real ghost, but the fact is, that moment was so meaningful to me. It just. It was like, I am not alone. Here is this is a real loss. And women have. Been suffering. From these losses for centuries. And their grief matters, and my grief matters, and these losses matter whether society wants to acknowledge it or not. And in a sense, it was like, all right, I've moved to the city. You know, Ram Dass has this quote about becoming no. One, I became no one. One knows me. The phone was not exactly ringing, shall we say. My most of my relationships had kind of gone to zero in the process of getting a divorce. I mean, I was completely alone at the age of 38, and suddenly I'm not so alone. There is a woman. Who went. Through this, and she may or may. Not still, on. Some level, be going through it. I don't know. But she was here and her baby was here, and they matter. And I mattered too, so that was a sort of catalyst moment and gave me permission to feel my grief and to acknowledge how horrific the whole experience had been, and to honor myself and to honor my daughter. And from there, that opened up a little bit of space, and I went and started to eat. I had been feeding my body for survival. I barely tasted. Food. In the middle of grief. I mean, look, I always say I transcended the trauma. I did not transcend the grief. The grief is the love. This was my daughter. This was my first child. And I will never transcend the grief and the love for her. But I did transcend the trauma. And that is where I believe so many people can reclaim themselves in their power. And there was a moment in the depths of my grief. I just remember this. There were a few people in my apartment. I'm Jewish. I did not formerly have Shiva, but you know, from the for my doctor. Is. Honestly, it was. It was so painful. I was too painful. But there were some people in my apartment a few weeks after the loss, and they. Everyone was looking at me and I was like, why is everyone staring at me? And I looked down and someone had handed me a bowl. I think it was mac and cheese or something. And I was so deep in grief. I registered that there was food and I registered I probably needed to eat it, but I had just eaten it with my hands. I was so deep in that I couldn't even conceive of. Oh, thank you for the mac and cheese. I'm going to eat a meal now. I'm going to go get a fork. I was so deep in survival that had been food for two years. Charleston has this very deep, very rich food culture. People. They are spiritual about food, heritage, seed cultivation and holding onto seeds for hundreds of years. And to ensure their pristine continuation, I met a woman who makes an art out of raising pigs. She raises pigs that the top restaurant purveyors want to buy and serve, and her philosophy of eating meat. Is only. Eat meat. That's had one bad day and it was such a different way of looking at it. Food. Like everything I had come from this. Go, go go. I've league law school. Okay. Now write for the New York Times. Status and achievement above all. And that was the culture that I had been so enmeshed in for so long. This was an entirely different way of looking at life. So I would go to the restaurants around my house and I would go on off hours because I really couldn't be around groups of people. I would sit down at the counter and I would talk to the chef or whoever was on the counter, and I would say, feed me what you do best. Just bring me something. And the chefs, several of the chefs got to know me. They would cook something beautiful because everything they could is beautiful, and they would give it to me and I would eat it and it re infused me with a sense of life. It brought life back into my cells and the act of of self-care and the act of feeding myself. It's almost like it gave me permission. I was giving myself permission to live again, because the sense of guilt and shame is so crushing. It is very, very tough to dig yourself out of that when you lose a baby like this. And so I ate, and the other thing I did was walk and move my body sort of taking care of myself in that way. And finally, in a sort of under the Tuscan Sun move, I took the last of my money. I really had no idea where money would ever come from again. But again, every day was an act of faith and a plunge into the unknown. I took the last of my money and I started fixing up the house because the house needed some work, and I. It was the last thing that I owned. It was the only thing I had left in this world. I wanted to bring out its beauty. I wanted to make it as beautiful as it could be, and it was a place where I could put my love, and it was something that I could physically transform. And lots of those three things were incredibly powerful and really began to bring me back to life. That's so beautiful and thank you for sharing that. Those are all such important things for us to do, because we can sit on our couch and we can sit there and cry and eat junk food. And but, you know, the movement is so important because it's a way to not only exert energy. I mean, you're giving yourself energy by walking, but it's a way to exert some of that excess grief and the excess energy that stuck inside you from a somatic place, nourishing, giving you, nourishing yourself with, with nutrients. Now it comes from a different standpoint. And then giving your love my words, not yours, to this house. And then what? That transform. You know, what comes up for me is like this metaphorical of like, okay, I'm watching this house transform, but I'm transforming as this house is transforming. I mean, that's what comes up for me. And I don't know if that resonates with you or not, but those are all beautiful healing. Now, did you do any type of therapy, or were you working with a coach or a therapist or anything along the lines to, through this process? Well, I've found many guides and many teachers in New York was really where. I left the. Realm of logic and reason. And if it hasn't been proved by the scientific method, it's bogus. Western medicine was not helping me. I come from a family of doctors. I have great respect for Western medicine and it was completely and totally ineffective. Yeah, yeah. Everything that was happening with me, I attended a support group, a stillbirth and infant loss support group, and I met two women who became extraordinary friends who had had losses, but also girls very similar to mine. One had lost her daughter under similar circumstances two weeks before my loss. And we were all working women in Brooklyn and we just we leaned on each other and we needed each other. And one of them said to me, I've been seeing this guy. You're not going to be into it, but you might want to try it. His name is Jonathan Hammond and he bills himself as an urban shaman. He's a former Broadway dancer who then trained as a shamanic healer. I work with shamanic healers. In the. Past. I had no idea what. Yeah. And also this was ten and a half years ago. I think we have come a long way in understanding this type of alternative healing and energy work etc.. And quite. Honestly, the Western medical world has, has moved further into the spectrum of of eastern medicine and alternative healing. Things like acupuncture, even Reiki are now much more mainstream. So I go see Jonathan in his one bedroom apartment in West Chelsea, and I still don't entirely. I'm not a trained shamanic, or so he put me on the table and he did a shamanic ritual. I had no idea what was going on. I was extremely skeptical. All I knew was I came in feeling pretty horrific. And at the end when I got to that table, I felt better and I learned to make that my ironclad barometer. Do I feel better from it? Well, then I don't ask questions. If it doesn't mean if it doesn't harm other people and it makes me feel better, then I don't ask questions. Right? I go with it because there's something that this person did and something that they know that I need to know. And when you are in such a dark hole and nobody has any answers, well then you go find the answers wherever you can. I mean, I know when I hit my rock bottom, which is, you know, my story is very different than yours, but it's like you're willing to grasp at anything that you think that might help you. It could be astrology, it could be a shamanic healer, it could be therapist. It could be a coach. Like it could be spiritual. All leaders like it could be the crystals on the bed, like. And I did it all. Of course. Know like you do it. All because you're just so desperate for answers. And there's nothing wrong with any of that if it makes you feel better. If, you know, in the somatic world, I talk about feeling more present and pleasant. If it's something that does both of those things, keep doing those things because that's your body and your nervous system. Saying that feels good to let me go towards that. Even though this other chaos that we might have been living is attractive because it's what we know or what our nervous system knows, that doesn't mean that that is good for us. So let's move over in here to this direction. What what you just said is so profound and was such a huge part of my healing. I always use the David Foster Wallace quote. There are two fish swimming in the water and they pass an older fish. And he says to them, hey boys, how's the water? And one of the younger fish looks at the other and says, what's water? We are swimming in water, and we often don't even know that we're swimming in water. Everything about our culture, everything about our society, our family structure. We are swimming in so much water you can't. When you are a fish, you don't see the water. You're not present to the water. It's just all around you. All the time. And if that water is toxic or dirty, your life is going to be deeply impacted. This was the biggest wake up call. What water am I swimming in? Yeah, yeah. Autumn. I want to know awareness. Like that's exactly right. And so from Jonathan I learned about alternative healing energy using energy medicine. And then I'm a deep dive learner when I find something that fascinates me I was school was tough for me because what I don't care. About a topic, I. Absolutely don't care. And you're not going to make me care. But once I do care, you. Won't stop me. In college it was reading Shakespeare. I was like, you know, every other professor could not care less about you, but anybody, anything that involves reading Shakespeare, I'm in. And I will read way beyond anything that anyone tells me to read. And all of it. And it taught me so much about life, so much about relationships and human dynamics. The water I started to become more present to the water that I was swimming in, and the water that my nervous system was used to, and a lot of it was very unclean. Water. So then it also becomes a process of cleaning your water. And Charleston allowed me to do that. It's not that the grief just wasn't there. It's not that the trauma wasn't there, but there was enough space to really start cleaning out the fish tank for love. To continue with the analogy, I became a practitioner. I studied Reiki, I read everything by John Eaton. I studied with Marie Matthew Cherish is a former oncology nurse turned alternative healer. She's incredible. I studied with some. Tutorials with various Buddhist monks and then the methodology that I found the most useful energy. Everything is energy. Quantum physicist now know this. The scientific community is embracing this. Billionaires in Silicon Valley are now aware of this. So anything that people sort of called woowoo is now actually becoming very mainstream. I needed language, I am such a linguistically focused person. I'm a writer. I've been a storytelling, a writer my whole life. I was raised by books. I needed language and energy. Work without language to me was too nebulous. It wasn't fully what I needed. So the energy healing modality, an alternative healing modality that so beautifully pairs with language, was created by a woman in Vienna stable. It's called Fady Healing, and it teaches you to do a meditation where you enter a theta brainwave state, which is now being talked a lot, a lot about because there's a lot more talk about neuro reprograming and reprograming your brain and rewiring. Exactly. Well, theta healing is very tapped into that, and it is very much marrying energy work with language. And that clicked for me, and I studied it pretty intensively and became a practitioner, mostly to work on myself because I work on myself so relentlessly, the amount of work that I needed was, was something where it was like, I need a 24 hour on call healer. Well, I guess that's going to be me. And. That education allowed me to do a lot in Charleston on my own. Now from Charleston, I got serendipitously this incredible offer from Facebook. I got a contract from Facebook to move out to Silicon Valley. And you can't make this stuff up. The work I was doing was this was back in 2016. Facebook wanted to tell a sort of kinder, gentler story about all the human stories and human thought of feats that were happening on Facebook. And one of the ways that I helped do that, I was working with Facebook Communications team, Mark Zuckerberg's team, and we lo, I worked on the launch of the first Facebook Community Summit, bringing together leaders of some of the biggest and most powerful groups on Facebook. Well, what are some of the biggest and most powerful groups on Facebook? Mothers groups. I was personally vetting and selecting all of these Facebook group leaders, and I would get on the phone with the heads of these mothers groups. And what are some of the biggest issues discussed in these Facebook groups? Infertility, miscarriage, infant loss, stillbirth, birth trauma, and then the continued trauma of motherhood in this society. Having to leave your baby too soon, being discriminated against in the workplace, being direct by your coworkers and in your career, not receiving support and instead getting judgment from your family and community. I mean, it went on and on, and I found myself in the nexus of this kind of pain on a global level, and that was fascinating. Mark Zuckerberg himself and his wife had just suffered three miscarriages on their path to have their three daughters. So the culmination of that work was I was on the team that got Mark Zuckerberg to get on stage with the three women who run prominent women's mothers groups on Facebook in front of several hundred people and many members of the press, and talk about miscarriages and. Talk. These kinds of issues. And that was deeply meaningful for me. From there, I burned out. I got well enough in Charleston to be able to do that work for about a year and a half, but after a year and a half, I knew that I wanted to get married again. I knew that marriage and more children were absolutely my priority. Honestly, I had gone to zero, so I had the opportunity to really look at my life and say what is most important to me? What was most important to me? What do you value? My value and more important than career to me was marriage and children. So that is what I focused on. But in order to do that, I had to do a whole nother level of trauma healing because it's one thing to be okay enough to, you know, go and show up in Silicon Valley. It's a whole nother thing, enough to fall in love again and then to carry more babies and then be a mother and a wife and part of a leader of a family, that whole nother level. And I am prouder of that than any career accomplish. Right? My biggest accomplishment in life are my four daughters. Like, you know, I'm most proud of that. And I feel so fortunate that I was able to stay home with my kids and be the primary influence in their lives. So as women, I think that which is why bringing this all full circle while losing a child is so devastating. Yes. I felt like the biggest failure in the entire world. I felt like everything that I had come here in to fill in this lifetime, I have failed. I felt that I had failed her, failed myself. I felt that I had failed my destiny and none of that was necessarily true. I want to point out that the stories we tell ourselves when we are in coma, these are not true. It's not the truth. There's actually a much bigger picture. You have to give yourself a little bit of time in order to see the bigger picture. And I mean a Churchill quote when in the worst nights when you are going through hell, keep going. Don't stop. Don't get stuck in a place because the trauma transcendence happens in the willingness to move. Even when you're going to hit, you're going to move and buckle in another hole. I mean, nobody's saying that this is fair, and nobody's nobody's saying that. Then it's a club that no one wants to be a member of. Right? Well, and we don't always get to choose what club we're a member of and what club we're not. Exactly. You don't. And and I think when we're very young, we have this idea of, okay, this is this is the life that I want to create for myself. This is the path that, you know, and I'm going to have the house with the picket fence, and I'm going to have two and a half kids, and I'm going to have to live happily, I'm going to get married, and I'm going to live happily ever after. I'm not going to have, you know, bad experiences happen to me because I'm doing all the right things, and I'm building this company and I have integrity and I'm working hard. Why me? But that's not life. Like we have to eat. As awful as these experiences are, we don't get to choose. We get to choose how we react. We don't get to choose what happens to us. That's right. So I have so many other questions for you, Melissa. And we could dive so much deeper. But in the essence of time, I have one question I want to ask cause I think this is important. And then I'll ask you, what are your confession is why is it more important now than ever to tell your story? This is the time I believe, that we. And when I say we, I mean all of humanity is being called upon to look at our deep pain. And not everyone's deep pain is the same. There are many, many sources of deep pain. I believe collectively we are being called upon to look, as Carl Jung would say, to go into the dark rooms and turn on lights. If we truly want to evolve as a society, if we truly want to evolve in our own lives, if we want to have the lives that we truly deserve. There are so many new unknowns about humanity and about our future. I climate change. There are many, many things calling for change on the horizon, whether we want them or not. They are here. As you said, we don't always get to choose. And so okay, what can we do? How can we maintain our power? How can we ensure that we are set up to live incredibly powerful lives and meaningful and joyous lives in the midst of all this change and transition, unknown and unknowns. And I believe in my soul that talking about these issues, surfacing them for all of us, whether you have suffered this or whether you have suffered something in your life, I don't think that humans get through a life without going through something, without going through some kind of trauma, some kind of loss. And we have not been taught adequate tools for how to, number one, get through these. And number two, transcend them and give them meaning so that we can take this awful thing and go live a more beautiful, joyous life because of it to make it worth it. No, of course it doesn't make it worth it. I got in a lot of trouble with the media one time for asking that question, but it's not about worth it. It's about it happens. We don't get to choose. We can't make it not happen to choose your own adventure. It happens. So then what are you sentenced to? A life of pain? Are you sentenced to PTSD for life or medication, etc.? Or are you being given an opportunity, a people opportunity? I'm not trying to to have, you. Know. It's it's brutal. It is an. Opportunity to transcend and become this unbelievable, powerful version of yourself. I want to stress I am not a different person. Everything that I have created, close trauma, transcendence is what I wanted so much to create before. Now, I am creating it ten times better than I ever could have hoped or imagined with people that I may not have let in before, but are the right people for me in a place I never thought I would live. And it's far more beautiful and incredible than I ever could have thought. And I had to go through this to get here. And I hope. That. For others who are facing trauma, I. Want. Them to get to this. Place. And especially for women who have been through these losses. You are the most powerful and the strongest people in this society. Whether you get credit for it. Warrior, warrior comes up this or that comes up for. Me. Honestly, any woman who has gone through this, you. Are. An unbelievable human being. You have survived something so horrific the rest of society can't even really comprehend. But yeah, yeah. I am also out here on behalf of all of us. Hey, maybe you know, as John Legend sings, I search for the leader and the leader was me. Well, maybe it's time for us women who have gone through this and come out the other end to say, hey, things are ugly, we've seen worse, and we're here to give you what we've learned. Yeah. Beautiful. And is there one confession you want to share as we come to a close that we haven't covered? Because we've covered a lot, but blood. I guess my confession may sound a bit silly, but it's an it's not, to me, a huge part for me of trauma. Transcendence was silly creature movies. I don't know why, but they helped me so much. You know, the jaws movies, The Meg, Jurassic Park, Anaconda, any movie about like, silly giant creature monsters and like, somehow that was just such a balm for my eyes. It was so soothing to me. Yeah, he's very ridiculous. Silly movies like give Yourself permission. Hey, look, I need. The most sort of ridiculous whatever. Humor. When you are in trauma, one of the hardest things for me was the sense of, am I ever going to be able to participate in laughter again? Am I to watch the things that brought me such joy? And I couldn't even connect with the joy or the laughter, so like, find something that just kind of brings you out of. It and it's okay to check out for a while and watch the silly movies or the music, the movies, the whatever it is. We have to give our phone to. The store and try on the most ridiculous, expensive pair of. Shoes, whatever it is. Like, do the thing you know in a safe. Don't blow your bank account buying the shoes. But like who can't go and try them on? Go whatever it is for you that may seem silly or may seem, oh, I don't want people to know about that. Who cares? Give yourself permission because you deserve, enjoy and you deserve a break. Try and have it be healthy and non self-destructive. Yes, exactly. But then if you slip, it's okay. Skip back on tomorrow or the next day. So and how can people find you Melissa. Well as I mentioned, I'm working on a book. It takes you through each section that I've just named. It opens in New York City. And then Charleston and then Silicon Valley and then ends in LA. It opens with the passing of my first child and and then ends with the healthy birth of my living daughter. I'm working on that. You can find me on Melissa sally.com. You can find me on Instagram. Melissa Sally speaks. And yeah, I wish everyone who is going through any type of trauma process. I wish you transcendence. Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your very vulnerable story with our listeners, and wish you much luck on your book, and I'm looking forward to staying connected and reading that once that's out. Thank you so much, Laurie, and thank you for the work you do. Thank you for listening to this episode of confessions of a Free Bird. I'm grateful to be in your ears and hearts. If you're interested in becoming a free bird, I'd love to support you. Please check out my website at Laurie E james.com to learn how we can work together, or to sign up for my newsletter so you can receive tips on how to date and relationship differently and ultimately find more freedom and joy in your life. If you found this podcast helpful, please follow or subscribe, rate and review and share it with friends so they can find more freedom in their second or third act. Also, until next time.