5. Lisa Huff - Navigating Family Trauma and Addiction

In this deeply moving episode of Radiant Resilience, host Tawny is joined by Lisa Huff, founder of Stylist Soul Tribe and a beacon of hope for many hairstylists. Lisa shares her profound story, reflecting on her tumultuous childhood, navigating her mother's bipolar disorder, and the impact of her husband's battle with heroin addiction. Despite facing immense challenges, Lisa's journey is one of growth, empathy, and ultimate resilience.

Join us as Lisa opens up about:

• The early struggles and trauma that shaped her childhood.
• The trials and tribulations of supporting a partner through addiction.
• Her transformative path to personal growth and the power of gratitude and empathy.
• How she balances her personal and professional life, turning past pains into strengths.

Lisa's candid storytelling offers valuable insights and hope for anyone grappling with similar challenges. Tune in to hear how she turned her life around and now helps others do the same, fostering connections and support through her community for hairstylists. This episode is a testament to the power of resilience and the human spirit's ability to overcome adversity

You can find Lisa on
IG: @lisahuffhair
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Transcript

  Before we begin, we want to acknowledge that some stories and discussions in this episode of Radiant Resilience may touch on sensitive and potentially triggering topics. These may include themes of mental illness, including bipolar disorder and psychosis, parental mental health struggles, substance abuse and heroin addiction, relapse and recovery from addiction, emotional and physical trauma, Family conflict and divorce, brief mentions of self harm and suicide, stress and anxiety surrounding infertility. 

Our goal is to share real life stories. And experiences in a respectful and empathetic manner, offering insights into the complexities of the human spirit and the journey towards resilience. However, we understand that some content may be difficult for listeners. We encourage you to prioritize your wellbeing and discretion when deciding to listen.

Please remember this podcast is not a substitute for professional advice or support. If you find yourself needing assistance, we urge you to seek help from qualified professionals or trusted support systems. Your mental and emotional health is important to us. Thank you for your courage and for joining us in a space of understanding and compassion. 

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.  

Welcome back to radiant resilience. I am here today with a very special person. I think all my people are special. Actually. I feel like I've said that for every interview, but you probably want to have them on if they weren't. It's true. It's true. I have today with me, Lisa Huff, who is actually my business coach for my hair business.

Lisa Huff is the founder of stylist Soul Tribe has a passion for helping hairstylists create their dream lives and businesses.  With over a decade of experience in the industry, she built a thriving business of her own behind the chair.  In 2018, inspired by her own yearning for sisterhood and connections she experienced in the industry, Lisa created Stylist Soul Tribe to provide hairstylists with the support and resources they need to succeed.

hairstylists together and help them achieve their personal and professional goals. Lisa finds true joy in seeing stylists like you come together, celebrate each other's visions, and support one another on their journeys to success.  . That bio was written a long time ago. I haven't heard that read aloud in a very long time.

Oh, really? Can I say that sums it up?  Yeah, alright. So me and Lisa met gosh, I don't know, a few years ago. I have no concept of time these days. It feels like a lifetime. It feels like just a little bit ago. I don't know. Yeah, so we met a few years ago. I I think I reached out to you to just do some one on one coaching.

And then I joined Stylist Soul Tribe, and have been in it for about two, three years maybe now. And getting to know her a little bit better, but Yeah, but we don't want to do all business stuff here. So  I'm excited to not have a business conversation right now. Yeah. Yeah. So Lisa has her own podcast for stylist soul tribe as well.

And so she does a lot of business talking podcasting. A little bit about your story personally, but Not a lot of the details, so I'm hoping to learn some about you, and hopefully your story will help others as well. So I don't know, where do you want to start? Do you want to go back to high school?

Do you want to, where do you want to go?  Oh goodness, I don't know, Tawny, I don't know where we should start. Cause yeah, what you said, and obviously I was a part of Tawny bringing this podcast to life. I launched my podcast, and she's I've always wanted to do this here's the idea I have.

So I know that. The theme behind it all is  capturing the stories of people's struggles and things that they've gone through and highlighting those in, in hopes of helping other people. Before we hit record, Tawny was just asking me what direction we want to go in. And I feel like when it comes to resilience and strength and things like that, there are a couple points in my life that I think really helped shape me into who I am when we're, Think about like the hard things and the struggle things.

So I guess we can go back to like childhood. If you want to start there. I think that's how we what we all are a product of. So absolutely all of that stuff. I recently read a book. It's called what happened to you by Oprah and some neuroscientist guy. I can never remember his name. But they talk a lot about  your childhood experiences and how much  that it, the stuff affects your brain,  even just biologically and scientifically, not even just the emotional side of it, just the way your brain processes stuff.

So I fully believe that our childhoods shape who we are for sure. So go ahead. Yeah. Okay. Bye bye. Where we're. Bye. I've been on a journey of personal growth for many years now, and I also just find nature versus nurture so fascinating. What's hardwired into your DNA versus what was part of your upbringing?

I find that really fascinating, too. I think it's a balance of both. Yeah, let's start back in November 5th of 1992, I was born into the world. And have an older sister who's four and a half years older than me, my dad, my mom, and my memories start, I, it's so fascinating also to hear, like, when people's brain starts remembering things.

Oh, for sure. I have very few memories before I moved from a town called Bolingbrook, which was the town that my parents brought me home from the hospital in Illinois, to Plainfield, Illinois. And I moved when I was five. five. So I don't have a ton of memory below five. I remember some of my close friends around there, things like that.

But then when I moved to my house in Plainfield, I  got a group of girlfriends that I'm still very good friends with now, and I think that helps Solidify the memories, like you remember the first time you met someone, things like that. Yeah, and I, so I remember meeting those girls when I first moved to playing field.

Kylie was the first person I met. I'm actually about to be with all of them on Thursday. Yay. We all fly to California together for a little trip, so I'm so excited for that. So yeah, my memory starts around five and. . My parents were 30 when they both had me. Tawny asked what I was comfortable sharing with, and I'm like, I try to be really mindful and really thoughtful of my digital footprint, but obviously a lot of, that's what I was saying to her, she's so what do you feel about sharing stuff about your mom?

What do you feel about sharing stuff about Ryan? And I just recognize that I'm a person that, Puts my life on social media and my mom doesn't choose to do that. My husband doesn't choose to do that. So I want to be very mindful of, like, how their stories play to roll into mine, but I feel very comfortable sharing my experience and my perspective because I can own that and that can be mine.

From my memory and from my recollection as a five year old kid, what do I know? I vividly remember my mom's mental health always as a kid kind of being a thing. And the memory that I have is around, like, when I was five and she was, so she was, like, 35. I remember it starting to affect our lives and it affected my parents marriage and it just affected things.

And I think in the beginning from my understanding, it was, like, a seasonal depression. Okay,  Yeah, I'm at 31 years old. We're all like, okay, I get it. I see a bit of that. Yeah, from my memory, it was like seasonal depression. It was starting to affect their marriage. It was starting to affect some other things.

Things like that. And then it would progress and get, more intense as I got older and she is now fully diagnosed bipolar. It's treatment for it. She's medicated for it. I'm very proud of her for the work that she's done, but it very much still affects. I can't speak for her, but it affects my relationship every day with her.

It just,  she goes through phases of mania and depression, and I have obviously spoke with a lot of people through, just having my own journey and private clients, things like that, friends of people who experience similar things, and my mom's mental illness, from my perspective, the mania is, Definitely the more intense charged up family emergency, all hands on deck, mom needs help.

Okay. Where depression, I'm sure she does deal with that, but that's a lot quieter. That doesn't affect my everyday life. And I think at this very moment when we're recording that, that's, I think, what she's dealing with. And again, she's medicated, so I hope she's good, but we just don't talk much when she's down.

But then when she ramps up, you know it, because it goes from not hearing from mom for, you a good eight, nine months to mom's calling you 20 times a day. Oh, wow. Being bizarre. And do you and your sister both  experience that? So you're both like, she did both of you in, we do one more over the other.

Oh God. It's weird talking about this tiny man. I'm just going to go there. This is my story. I haven't shared this deep before, but yeah. So my sister and I are super duper close to the point where like probably not anymore but when our when my daughter was like a baby and we were really talking like all day every day i probably was slightly co dependent on my sister but like we have bonded so much nobody really gets it except for us so we have about two hours apart from each other i moved a little bit further away i think from my own journey.

It's just what felt right for me. Her and my mom are definitely closer on a daily basis, which I love that. I love that they have their connection to each other, but it's interesting.  This is my own thing I should probably work out through therapy, too, is when my mom is manic, my sister becomes the bad guy, and she points us against each other, and she wants more of a relationship with me when she's manic, but then from my perspective, it's like, why does my mom only want a relationship with me when she's out of her mind?

That's hurtful, yeah, for sure. Yeah. That's it. Oh, yeah. So did you have to eventually put your own boundaries in place there for that? And I know for my own experience I didn't have a lot of knowledge and stuff of boundaries and stuff when I was younger. So that stuff is a lot harder. or pretty much non existent when I was at age, especially with family.

And then as I've gotten older, I've learned what a boundary is and how good they can be and have put some of my own in place. So did you feel like you had to do that? And then what was the timeframe on that, that you feel like you had to do that? Yeah, I think from a young age, and me and my sister have psychoanalyzed this as well. 

I was five when my mom's mental illness started showing itself and then it continued to get worse and worse. So my sister, again, being four and a half years older than me, has a lot more good memories with my mom. Like she had,  That childhood before things got really hard. Yeah, so she was like close to 10 or something like that, right?

Yeah. So those formative years they, I think things were really good. I think my mom and my dad's marriage was really good. I think that they lived a very healthy life. And I think our age has something to do with it. I was a very angry child from almost as far back as I can think.

I remember my predominant emotion being anger. And my parents divorce started when I was in fourth grade, so that would make me, what, nine? So mental illness started really taking an effect around five. It was a hard few years. They decided to get divorced, but then their divorce was so messy and so awful.

It wasn't finalized until I was in eighth grade. So it was like my whole nearly, really formative years of my childhood was this like knock down, drag out, court, custody, fighting. It took four years for them to finalize and come to an agreement. Wow. Which is messy. Yeah. Yeah, because I think when my parents got divorced, it was like  they filed and three months later they were divorced.

It's pretty straightforward. Yeah. And like my dad owned a business. So I think that had a part of it. We had a house. We had a boat. We had the kids, but I think my mom's at mental illness just made it really hard because when she is manic, and also at this time, she wasn't diagnosed, she wasn't medicated, she was self medicating with, not hard drugs, but she was smoking weed, she was drinking, she was, not the healthiest, trying to cope with her own.

This is my, again, my perspective as a child watching that growing into an adult. So I think  I just started putting distance from the youngest age. I vividly remember, and I still have guilt for it. How mean I was to my mom. She, I also,  was not a safe person to be around, but I was screaming, angry, mad, mean, locked my doors at night did not want anything to do with anyone.

My dad was a little bit more of my safe place, and I was a mom I, I think back, and I don't know if that was all right, I don't know what all, but, I just connected with him a little bit more  through what I felt a little safer there. I was also a manipulative kid though, so I would put them against each other.

If mom doesn't let me do something, okay, I'll go to dad's. Until he doesn't let me do it, then I'll go to mom's. I feel like most people do that to some degree. Yeah. So I was a little bit of a wild child. So when you say boundaries, like  I started dating my husband, Ryan, that I'm with now when I was 17 and in high school, I would go a week and my mom's a week and my dad's a week and my mom's a week and my dad's, I live on my truck, all of my clothes were in my truck.

I bounce around. I had all my friends. All I was worried about was my social life. And then by 17, I was basically living with Ryan. So I didn't really have to put boundaries. I put distance between my family and I from such a young age that. Now I almost am trying to bring a little bit more closeness because I was get the fuck away from me for a period of time.

Yeah. Yeah. So I didn't really need to put, I've learned a lot now and I feel like I can communicate with my family, especially if my mom's going through an episode or something with love. I don't, I used to scream and react out of trauma, and now I'm just Hey, you gotta do what you need to do.

I know you're struggling with this and stuff, but I never really had to, I don't have a memory of okay, boundaries are getting into place. It was more like a, are we swearing on here? I guess I'm already swearing. It was pretty much fuck you. I hate you for a very long time. And then I grew up and I'm like, no, you're my family. 

I need to find a happy medium in there. So boundaries, not really. It was just Lisa wasn't really connected with people for a long time. Interesting. So you were the opposite. That was like my defense mechanism.  Yeah. Was to separate. But the distance there. Yeah. And I still do that.

That's just like my safety. Interesting. Are there any particular memories that you remember like  popping up for you that you'd be willing to talk about with your, cause I'm trying to think of people listening who have also struggled with a, whether it's a parent or a sister or somebody that also struggles with bipolar and growing up around that and trying to figure it out.

 Was, there's a specific memory that you feel like was a turning point or that sticks in your brain real, real deep. I have,  and I have shared this stuff with my mom before when we've had some deeper conversations. I just remember feeling afraid of her at a young age, especially when she was manic.

And even still, I can talk , on the phone with my mom if she is switching into a manic episode, and in half a second, I can tell you.  It's, she switched. Buckle up, the next four months are gonna be intense, because mom's manic. And my mom has also had episodes of mania that have gotten so far that she's ended up in psychosis and had to have been institutionalized.

There's been times that she was, like, hallucinating at the O'Hare airport and got taken away. Real mental illness, and that's why some people just throw around bipolar, and that's fine, but it's very intense,  what she has, and I know that people in her family had that, and that's been a fear that I've been, as we come to age, and we face mortality and things like that, I think about that, too, as I'm not 35 yet I have those fears all the time, and that's been, like, an internal thing, but no, I have memories just as a kid of,  Just being really embarrassed.

She would, she acts really bizarre when she's manic. And so like I'd have friends sleep over and she'd wake us up at the ask crack of dawn, just saying weird stuff. And I remember when there was like the royal wedding whenever Peyton William got married. Oh yeah. I remember Everyone remembers that.

Yeah. It was like a school day morning and my mom was like, buddy from AA was over in the middle of the night and she was waking me up and I was pissed off. Like just. Shit that kids shouldn't have to deal with. And even now looking back at why I have a really hard time. And part of me hopes she does listen to this because we should have these conversations, but I look back now as an adult with kids myself there was a period of time where she let a homeless man live in her basement who was, like, a registered sex offender.

Just really bizarre things. And when she was manic, she'd get really into AA and just be hanging around with like really sketchy weird people and she'd be bring weird people around but that's the weird thing about bipolar disorder is like when I'm describing this you're like oh my man your mom's like really nuts but like when she's not manic she's not like that and so it's really hard  She's,  I don't know.

That's, I still struggle with that. I don't know what the baseline version is. Because like I said right now,  I call her, I want to talk to her. Hey mom, how are you doing? And we're on the phone for 17 seconds. And she's okay, bye. And it's so I don't really know. It's tricky. It's something I'm still like navigating to this day.

Trying to build that relationship back up or just Or even just something of substance. I see her pretty regularly. It just doesn't really feel like it's of substance when she's well. And then when she's unwell, she tries really hard. And then that's you can't rationalize with someone who's out of their mind, so that's not a proper time to have those conversations because she's not making sense during that time. Yeah. Yeah, did you guys have to convince her to start medicating for that, or did she do it on her own eventually, or? Yeah, so I know when I was a kid and she was like trying to figure out what was going on and my dad was part of it.

Let me also say my dad is no saint either. He was not the most patient husband. They shouldn't have been together, but I know there was a period of time where she was like taking antidepressants, trying to figure out what was going on, but then, like I said, again, from my perspective as a kid, I'm sure there was a lot deeper shit going on.

Yeah. But I'm, I know she was like on and off medications trying to find something that works, but I've learned a lot through this just of like mental health is like the medication that my mom's had now is like not even for bipolar people. It's like a very low dose of an antidepressant and that's all she needs to stabilize her.

Oh, wow. She doesn't take it like she's going to lose her job. She's going to lose her house. Everything's going to hit the fan. So I've also just learned that like mental health. Medications is all trial and error. Nobody knows what they're doing. The system is so screwed. Like it's so hard to get in with a doctor.

And then when you. Are mentally ill. You're either depressed and not going to your visits or you're choosing not to take medication because you're on a high or something like that. The one when it really got serious enough was that time I told you when she she was having a manic episode. It went into psychosis.

It was actually.  No, it wasn't. When was that one? Oh, God. No, it was my sister's wedding. Oh, no. It happens around really high tense things. Like, when she's stressed is when she starts to lose, because routine. She stops sleeping as well. She stops taking her meds, things like that. And my sister's wedding.

wedding was coming up and it was in Florida and my mom was living in a hotel at the time and didn't have the means to get to Florida but wanted to be there for my sister's wedding and the stress was getting really intense for her and that's when she did flip into full blown psychosis and that was terrifying.

Oh man. It's very scary watching somebody you love go through that and that's when she like the police picked her up from the airport and put her in a facility and she was there for, I don't remember, a few weeks and then  She's been,  I think that was the only time, and then there was another episode when my nana died, when her mom died.

So these high stress situations bring it out of her, she stopped sleeping good, and that one we tried to get her to go to a hospital, but she wouldn't go. So she ended up just working with her doctors and stabilizing back out, but it's a long run. I know some people with their bipolar, it's by the day they switch a million times.

No, my mom's is like  months, she'll be down, quiet, things are good, and then it ramps up and it takes a while to get her back to a stable  space. So you talked about how angry you were about everything and everyone. I mean what other feelings come up for you when you think back to those times of Yeah, you're young kid  dealing with that.

And, realistically, we should be able to rely on our parents to have some stability. Yeah. So what kind of feelings come up for you when thinking back on all this stuff? Definitely the older I get, the more empathy I have because there was no empathy for a while. And I do like it's our parents first time at life to, so I am having more and more empathy.

But yeah, I think Anger, disappointment, sadness, things like that, because like you said,  a kid, a child should have that. And now that I'm an adult, again, thank God I don't suffer with these things, but in my opinion, and from my perspective, it's not that hard to have your stuff together, I feel, and so it makes me even more even still, the way me and my husband financially prepare for our lives, the way we just like, do things how you're supposed to do.

I think most people who come from a family who doesn't do that probably feel similar. It's not that hard to just do things how you're, how you should, how you, to do it the right way. So I deal with that, but then again, I also have a ton of humility, and every time I catch myself thinking like this, I'm like, Lisa, you're only 31 years old.

Who knows what life's going to throw at you. But that's the interesting thing. When my parents were my age and this trips me up, they had a storybook, picture perfect. Like we moved into a really nice house and a really nice neighborhood. When I was five years old, we would boat on the weekends. Like they were doing well.

My dad is owning a business. So I try to have like humility of that too, is like life can knock you down and you can lose the things that you've worked really hard for. But I think that's just my like desire to. Do something in this life is like I just don't want to be 60 something with nothing to show for it.

And yeah, having your kids worried about you, and worried what's gonna happen next because that's not fair or right. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any like grief  over maybe the childhood you could have had or anger towards that at all or Do you think about that? Yeah, I definitely you come across those TikToks that are like, oh, I couldn't live without my mom.

That is always gonna be a painful thing for me. I will never know a relationship like that, unfortunately. I get glimpses of it, but that makes it almost even more painful that I don't have the stability of that always. So yeah, but I also don't know it, so that's hard to grieve something you don't know.

I think my sister probably maybe has more of that because she does have more better memories.  What about as a mom yourself, like I I don't know what order I'm going to air all these in, but a couple of my interviews are people who have lost parents or parent, like figures. And one of the things that they've said is that as.

As a mom themselves, they wish that they could reach out to their moms for advice at sometimes you're like, what did you do in this moment? So I'm assuming that's not something that's super easy for you to do. So even though your mom is still here,  do you have moments like that too? What I'm really mindful of, it's so crazy the eclipse is happening and it's starting to get darker outside.

That's so wild. 

. Just asking for advice and things like that. Yeah. Yeah, as a mom yourself, wishing you could go to your mom and say, Yeah, so I would say, yeah, I would say I am more mindful of the way you treat a kid will last forever and it will change how you, what your relationship is like when you get older, when they get older, so I, God, I hope that I am doing the best job that I can, that my kids still like me when I'm an adult and want to have a relationship with me and want to be around me but no, for me personally My mom sometimes will make comments and try to give that feedback and that's triggering for me Maybe that's something I need to work through but like in my head.

I just want to be like bitch What are you talking about? No, yeah, so I don't know that so that's a tough one for me That's still some anger and resentment that I hold on to but like when she gives me advice and one of the biggest like triggers for me. I'll say this and my sister and I have spent a lot of time talking about this.

Every time she's manic, she'll make these comments that say, one day you'll understand me. So one day, like you'll get what this is like. And she used to say that to me as a kid, like I'd be a teenager and she'd say, wait till you have kids. You'll understand one day, the older and older I get, the more and more I'm like, no, I do not understand.

And like the last time she said that to me, when she was manic, I called her on it. I'm like,  I'm 31 years old. I am a grown woman. Don't, stop telling me I'm gonna understand the inner workings of your brain. Take ownership that the inner workings of your brain aren't, don't make sense in this world.

I don't know. Yeah. There's anger coming out.  Yeah, that's okay. Yeah that's tough. It's tough to that's interesting now that she's You'll understand one day, like what's the one day, I mean I guess, maybe that's just something she's just always said, so it's just, yeah. And I think that was something she heard as a kid.

Okay, and I don't know how much of this to share. Also through my own research and digging and stuff, my mom has gone through a lot of trauma herself. She was a, one of five children, her 19 years old. Fell through a skylight. He was a roofer with my papa. Fell through and died at 19 when I was like 13 or something.

When I was a teenager, my aunt committed suicide. Oh, wow. I know by nana, my mom's mom had multiple suicide attempts. Like mental health is. Deep in this family and religion is interwoven very deeply. And so now I have like religious triggers because  my whole life, my Nana was, and I hate talking about something like this.

She's not around anymore. God it's tricky for me to navigate this. But as a child, She was very Jesus is coming. The world is ending. It was scary to be around her as a kid because she had mental health stuff and she was extremely religious. And when my mom is manic, she also gets very religious.

And so religion is very I wish that was a safe place that I could explore. And every time I step into that, it's very triggering for me. So there's a lot of deep woven things in there. And I know as a kid, I think my mom experienced some I don't know. Maybe trauma, maybe abuse, maybe something at the hands of church things.

So I have a lot of empathy for it too. And the one time she was like hallucinating and she was having her psychosis, every time she has psychosis, it's she said there was like a  satanic Santa Claus that she saw or something or like the last time she was like running through a parking lot and I was on the phone with her and she was like screaming talking to Jesus like  deep hard yucky not fun to talk about things.

Oh wow. Yeah, so it's a lot. It's intense. Just like we were talking about at the beginning of this like I, I mean I've learned so much through my journey and my years and stuff like that too and luckily I've not been through on the extreme end of traumatic. But I'm trying really hard at this stage in my life to have more compassion for all the people because  you just don't know what people have been through, right?

And I don't think anybody wakes up with a fresh set of life and decides I'm gonna be a shitty person. Nobody does that. They've had things happen to them and it's shaped them into who they are. And I have a lot of empathy for that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm, this is bringing me back to that book again that I was reading about the brain because that's what like their whole premise of the book was because it was called what happened to you.

And they, they talked a lot about we need to be asking more frequently what happened to you instead of what's wrong with you. Because none of, like you said, none of this stuff just happens to people it, there is a root cause to it, whether it was, even in childbirth or something like that, we all, we've all been through something.

I'm reading The Body Keeps the Score right now and it talks about like how trauma is stored in your body and it is extremely fascinating. It is teaching me a lot about me and people that I love and yes, I completely agree. Super interesting. Yeah, that's pretty crazy living.  I know. And I have this podcast now and everybody like wants to hear more about my story.

I'm like, you guys, it's nothing like fun to talk about, and I guess you just want to like, and I so respect what you're doing with that, but it's it's almost like you said, sometimes you want to tie a bow up on it and give a lesson out of it. And sometimes life is just messy and doesn't have a perfect like.

plot and solution to that. And sometimes we're still navigating it. You're forever going to be navigating your mom with bipolar. That's just, because that's just how it is. And now I'm just trying to do it the most empathy and grace that I can. So that one day when she's not around or I'm not around, who knows which will come first.

I just don't have regrets, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'm glad that you're getting through that and you got through it. So I guess maybe we'll back up and go maybe to where you met Ryan and start from there. Yeah, fair to say. Obviously I've had tons of things along the way, but another big, I think, formative, Part of my story and my lifetime and my journey is my husband who I'm married to now.

When we first started dating, or early in our dating years, he dealt with heroin addiction really intense. It was a lot. And so now that I psychoanalyze myself, I'm sure my upbringing and wanting to be out of my house and things like that, I didn't really have the  foundation of what a healthy relationship should be, and I'm very cold.

So we've actually known each other for a very long time. So we lived in the same town. His brother is my age. So Ryan's three years older than me, but like his brother was in my fourth grade class. So I've known him for a long time. You, my friends, used to have a crush on Ryan. Like he was his older brother.

He was good friends with one of my friends, older sister. So I've known him for a long time, but then, Obviously you grow up and life goes on and when, since he was three years older than me, I don't even remember ever seeing him in high school. But when I was in between my summer, between my junior year and my senior year, he messaged me on Facebook and was just like, I haven't seen you in a while.

And now I know he was like freshly out of prison, like looking to connect with people. I didn't know that at the time. I was just like, Oh, Ryan Huff, Adam Honey, like he's messaging me, but then I quickly learned that like he had lived a lot of life in between that time and so when we started dating, he was clean and sober and he told me these things, but honestly, Tawny, I was 17 and I was like, trouble.

I thought it was a little bit cool and yeah,  and I was young and I, my friends were 17 and Ryan was about to turn 21 and I knew he could buy me alcohol. And I thought that was cool. He had tattoos and nobody my age had tattoos. Oh, yeah. Our judgment at that age was definitely not.

He drove a motorcycle. He was just like this sexy bad boy. And I was super into that. And I knew, okay, so the town that I grew up in at the time, again, my parents moved to this nice town. We lived in a nice house in a nice neighborhood. There was, we were about 45 minutes outside of Chicago. I graduated high school in 2011.

There was a heroin epidemic in that area. Oh, okay. All the kids, parents had money, lived too close to Chicago. I don't know if you've ever watched the show Dope Sick, but it's about the Oxycontin rise, and it was like watching our childhood. Oh, wow. It started with the pills. It quickly turned into addiction.

Heroin was cheaper. It was a 30 minute drive to the city. And I have lost so many friends. Ryan has lost so many friends. Ryan was one of those people. So I personally, I like to drink. I like to have fun when I was younger.  But I was never like gonna do that. Like I had my head on straight enough. Like I didn't want to do any hard drugs.

I like smoked a little bit of weed. It made me super paranoid. I never wanted to do anything like that. So when I started dating Ryan, I was never like cool with the drugs. Like I never did it with him. I never was like into that, but I was, I fell madly in love with him very quickly. And then he relapsed and  I was young and into him.

And I went through that whole, I was never cool with it. We fought a lot about it, but he.  Did drugs for a little bit. I'd find them. I'd flush them. We'd fight. We'd get in these screaming fights. It was a dark time. I, sometimes I ended up going on in the car with him to the  hood of Chicago to pick up drugs and putting myself in situations I never should have put myself in.

He would use in front of me. And I don't know why. I look back now and I'm like, why would you put up with that, Lisa? But  How long into your relationship then did he relapse? It was quick. It was. At the time, it felt like we were soulmates and we were together forever, but we were probably only together for a month or two.

Oh, wow. That is really quick. It was quick. Yeah. So now I look back, I'm so grateful. I love my husband. He is an incredible man. I love my children. Obviously, everything happened how it was supposed to, but I look back and somebody should have. But I say somebody should have said something. People said things.

I wasn't listening. Yeah, that's huge. And I put people on distance, like I was just into him and into that and  I guess maybe my intuition knew. I have no idea. I have no idea. Were you a fixer? Did you date a lot of guys you thought you could fix? I had one serious boyfriend other than Ryan.

Like I haven't had a ton of boyfriends and he was a little bit of a loser. And didn't, I don't know. I'm sure he's fine now, but yeah, I wasn't like out fixing people. I was young. I was really young. So like I said, at the beginning, it was a thing. Thrill. And then, I think it was, I think I was almost addicted to the chaos a little bit and the emotional charge of just the fights and the drugs and all the things.

I think that was attractive to me at 17. Obviously, your mom, or anybody else, like your childhood, nobody was necessarily addicted to heroin, but maybe that environment mimicked it so it felt normal to you, to a point. And, throughout all of it Ryan and I really did love each other, and I don't know if I ever felt like, Super duper loved before that so maybe it was a bit of that because even when he was using like he wanted to get clean it was a addiction like it was hard and it was love like it was he wanted to get clean he wanted to be with me he wanted this but he was also fighting this addiction and I have a lot of empathy for that now too because I would watch him like you  Pale on the face, shaking, throwing up sick.

And I was like, yeah, I want you to feel better too,  only understanding of a heroin addiction, this is interesting actually, just last year, I went to visit my friends in Canada. And we were walking around Vancouver.  And, we like to walk. all over cities. We don't normally do many Ubers or anything like, and so we'd gone to brunch and we were going to walk to this brewery and Colin, like Google maps it.

And we start walking there and we start walking down the street and so many homeless people doing drugs right there. I think it was a variation of heroin crack meth, like all of it. I'm not versed enough in any of that to even recognize it. I probably could have told you what it was. 

I like walked by and Colin's I've never seen anybody actually doing drugs, like  in front of everybody. And I was like, oh, that happened. Like I missed it the first time. Anyway. So we ended up on this street which all my Canadian friends I'm sure have heard of. I think it's Hastings street in Vancouver, which is literally not where you should be. 

Of the homeless people on drugs, like covering both sides of the street. And I walked through there now they could care less if we were there, they did not even see us. We heard drug deals going on. We saw people, there were cops around just making sure that everything's safe. That's how Chicago was too.

When Ryan used to drive to pick up, like cops didn't even interfere. It was a fear. full blown probably multi million dollar business that was being run on this corner. And you'd pull up and there'd be, like, a guy on the corner on the phone, and then a guy there tell, say, okay, this white boy from the suburbs is coming and you'd go pick up, the guy would walk out, give money, boom, you'd leave.

Cops didn't even interfere. They could go at any moment and any day, and it was such a big operation that they didn't even take part in it. There was, they had to deal with the cops. shootings and stuff in Chicago. Yeah. And these cops were there, but I think that they were just making sure things didn't get out of hand, right?

If fights started happening or something broke out, then they would get involved. But literally I walked past a drug deal happening. They were bargaining over price and we just walked by. So anyway, so we told our friends about it later. And our one friend up there is a paramedic and we started talking about it and they said it started with the opioid epidemic and it's ever started with pills. 

You should watch the show Dope Sick on Hulu. It's really good. Okay. It's like toxic. It's like from the creators, like what Pfizer is. It's like the creators of the drug and how they just falsely pushed it to doctors, prescribed this to everyone, it's non addictive, and then it turned into the party scene, and then it, seeing firsthand what an opioid addiction withdrawal looks like you can't blame people.

They need it. It is bad. It's really bad. Yeah. Our friend was explaining to us  what happens When people start having, when they come off the high and they need it again and he said it was like, it's he didn't know firsthand, but he's explaining it as a paramedic, their entire body is like an electric current.

That's just like zinging and like on fire, basically physically. And so vomiting and. Yeah. So the only thing that shuts it off is doing more. So that's why it's so intensive and addiction because it physically hurts. So like restless leg syndrome, like what you're saying, like the tingling, even until even to this day, Ryan has been sober now, I should preface this for listeners.

Ryan got sober probably 12 years ago. So it's been a long time now. He is fully past. He used to still have dreams about it for probably a good five to eight years. He used to. suboxone to get off of it, which people have different feelings about that. He didn't do a traditional 12 step program. It was its own kind of like journey, but he,  it is still triggering to him.

If he has the flu and he can't sleep and his body is aching to his brain, it goes to like dope sick. And he says he remembers one time that he was in jail. I think he was just 14. For for a night. He used to sell drugs. He used to do all sorts of stuff. But he was so sick that he remembers ripping his bed sheets in jail.

The overnight holding cell. And tying his legs to cut off the circulation because the pain of his legs Tingling and not being able to sleep. That's still triggering for him when he can't sleep, he like takes a hot shower and it's, it feels like a lifetime ago, obviously he's not having any of those, but those memories will still come back that it's anxiety inducing for him, even still 12 years later.

And your brain and your body still remembers that for sure. That brain book again, I'm just going to go back to it. Apparently you tell the story of this kid who. Was abused by his biological father than abused by his foster father to the point that it put him in a coma in the hospital and they brought a I don't remember the point of this, but they brought a shirt of the biological father, the kid while he was in a coma and the smell of it.

Wow. He had a physical reaction in a coma. Just from the smell of that. So that stuff never leaves you. Like that, it, to some degree, it stays with you mentally, whether it's in your brain, or whether it's physically in your body. Yeah. Yeah, so like I said, from the beginning even when Ryan relapsed, it was like I relapsed, I don't want to be using.

It was just so weird. so hard and he was still hanging out with the same friends running into the same people like he slipped up he used to get and then it was hard and then he had a period of time where he was sober for eight months and I thought that was like the end of it and he was working for my dad and we were still living up in Naperville near Chicago.

And he was clean for eight months, he was on Suboxone, and he relapsed again. And I remember that time being like, I really should leave him. I should not do this again. And somehow I stuck around and that is his actual sobriety date. So February 10th, 2012 is like the day he was like, come back to the apartment.

I'm gonna take a suboxone right now. I'm done. I promise. Come back. And I remember we put my childhood dog down the day before on February 9th, and I was just sad and I just wanted to lay with him. I was just like, okay, so I went back. He took it and from that day, he's never used again. But How old were you at that point and how long had you guys been together by the second we left?

It was 2012.  I was 19. So we'd been together for two years doing this on. And then, like I said, there was an eight month stretch of him being clean. So it was just chaotic, good. We lived together. And then, He got clean that last time and he was like, we need to get out of Chicago. He didn't have his driver's license at this point.

He had lost his driver's license. He was still on probation. He like, if he was failed drug tests, he was going to go to prison for nine years. Like he really needed to fucking get a shit together. And he knew it. He was struggling though. So Suboxone, for those of you that don't know, is like an opioid.

It blocks your opioid receptors, so it stops the withdrawal symptoms if you use while you're on it, you get viciously ill you puke, you shit, it's horrible so you know that people aren't using if they're on Suboxone, but some people have strong opinions that it's trading one addiction for another, but Ryan was on suboxone for two or three years, and I am a huge advocate for that or whatever other, and some people say no, but for two years when we had a baby and a child, it was like he was taking a vitamin every day to live a normal life.

Getting off suboxone was very hard for him because it is its own. He withdrawal you can just control it more like you can take less and less and do it slowly. But. I would say his dreams and his like hardcore cravings didn't go away until he was fully off Suboxone. It took years. It took a long time.

So he was like, we need to get out of this town. Like I can't bump into my same old friends. I can't, do any of this. So we moved from Where his mom was living, which was two hours south, and that's Lincoln, Illinois and I still work there. And he was like, I'm gonna, first he's gonna go to school for HVAC, because he was working with my dad.

My dad owns an HVAC company, and he's I'm gonna get clean, I'm gonna do this. And then his aunt was like the president of the school he was gonna go to, and she was helping him with financial aid and stuff. And with his record, they were like, maybe you shouldn't do HVAC, because you have to go in people's houses, and that might run into something.

She was like, why don't you do welding? It's super in demand. You can make good money. You should go to school for welding. And so we were like, okay. We're going to move down south. Ryan's aunt is going to take him to and from welding school every single day. And we're going to try this. And I was 19 and I was like, I love you.

Let's go. Again, I didn't really care about my parents. Like I wanted to get away. I wanted this adventure. And again, I was probably a little bit addicted to the chaos. And  the day we moved into the house in Lincoln, I remember it vividly. I will never forget this moment.  The only thing there was a mattress, a TV, and that's it.

We were gonna go the next day to pick up all of our stuff, and his mom was gonna help us with that move. And I took a pregnancy test, and I found out I was pregnant that day. And so then, Ryan was like three months clean at this time. And I was pregnant, and I was on birth control. It was, I've told you this story, Tawny.

I know stories are fucking wild. And Then we were like, okay he was already like on his way back to sobriety and being clean and like creating this better life and I think Skylar was just like Hands down  a god thing. I don't know. I don't know how or why else that could have happened. And then at that point,  that must have been like  May?

May? Yeah. And then it was like, okay, we have a baby coming. You need to go to welding school. You need to stay clean. Then we had a baby. And then he had, what, maybe a year of sobriety under him to a year and a half. And then he got out of welding school and all of his teachers were like, Oh, you can make really good money if you like go down to the coastline and you like do ship, work at a shipyard and do all these things.

So he was like, okay, let's go. So when Skylar was two months old, Ryan and I got in the car, we drove all the way down to Houma, Louisiana. He took a welding test there. Got a job there, and we've just been going non stop since then, and then obviously getting a track record, but for him, and I, again, this I've said this to him before do you ever feel like you should go speak to recovering addicts, or yeah, and he's, my story was so  While he wanted to get clean, yes, it really was out of his control.

It was just one thing in front of another, perfectly aligning, where he could not, one, have access, even if he had a bad moment two, had, here's another reason to keep going, here's another reason here not The reason for just years until all of a sudden he looks back and he's Whoa, look what we've created.

This is crazy, and now I have a 11 year old daughter and an eight year old son and an incredible, truly, I'm like, truly an incredible life. And I've shared this a little bit.  And Soul Tribe are on my own podcast and stuff. A couple years ago, a few years ago, when I really got into some like personal growth stuff, I had some like serious resentment start to bubble up.

I was just like,  maybe looking back at my 17 year old self you are dumb. While you have this beautiful life,  things were bad. You should not have participated in that. You should not have been part of that. And then I got really like angry at Ryan all over again for things that, We've totally been past, but that I had to work through, and that was a lot of my time with Kristen Sosman and stuff, and just energy healing, and just healing old wounds that existed in me, because I get mad at Ryan about, our puppy peeing on the floor, but I'm actually mad at Ryan for lying to me about using heroin.

It was, like, old stuff started to bubble up. You didn't, I'm assuming that it started bubbling up because you never dealt with it at the time. I guess not. We were just moving so fast. Yeah. And I guess, how do you deal with it? When someone breaks your trust so bad or addiction is part of it you just need to prove yourself.

There's no, it's how you snap your fingers and it's oh, this is healed. Yeah. I was along for the journey. He needed to get a decade of time behind him before we could really open that back up and heal it, yeah. Yeah, for sure. Cause you really needed to just focus on him, Getting sober and stank.

We were just living life. We had a baby, and then we got married, and then we had another baby, and then I started this business, and life just happens. But then I found myself in this settled, calmness you have the house, you have the cars, you have the white picket fence, you have the family, and all of a sudden I'd start getting mad.

My childhood anger would almost bubble up.  And I've worked, I've dealt with that and I right now in this very moment for the last couple of years, I've felt very solid and I have closed a lot of those chapters and tied up a lot of those loose ends, but that's the human experience is just like addressing things as they bubble up, did you guys do any therapy or anything like that? Or how did you just talk about it? Is that how you got through it? We communicate, Ryan and I communicate.  So deeply, all the time, always have, always will. So yeah, but in the moment when I was like angry, I didn't even know what it was.

I don't even remember when it like hit me that's what it was. That specific one, like what I'm discussing just a few years ago, that was like my own, it had nothing to do with Ryan. He was good, like he was living his normal life. I had my own. Healing that came or need for healing that came up.

And I had to work through that on my own because every, everyone was doing life around me. It was just almost this knock at the door from the past of oh, I don't know. And I would all of a sudden just lash out and get angry with him or whatever. It was almost like once there was calmness, maybe that was my, instinct was to create chaos.

I don't know. Interesting. Yeah. I'm always psychoanalyzing. But no, as for therapy, and it's tricky, because, like I said,  My whole life, my mom went through therapy. Another thing is, like, when my mom was manic, like I said, she was very into the AA scene. Okay. To the point where she had an affair with an AA bad things were happening.

That is great for people, but Ryan didn't go the N. A. route, and that story is you are always an addict, you always will be an addict I'm not saying it's right or wrong, it's lasted this long and helped this many people, but I don't know, I've tried therapy, I've tried talking to these things, and I remember during that period of time, when shit was just bubbling up, it was like, my mom's stuff was bubbling up, Ryan's stuff was bubbling up, I tried going to this therapist, and she was the same, she was like, here's an Al Anon resource, blah, blah, blah, and I'm just like,  I just, I think my version of therapy is just like deeply learning and like diving into the inner workings of human behavior  and forming my own opinions and communicating and yeah, I attempted therapy for a little while and I found somebody that specifically specialized in infertility stuff too. 

I don't know. I needed more, I wanted to do something more active because I can call my mom, I can call my sister, I can call my friends, and I can talk about it because I'm a pretty open human being too. Like I'm, but like I went a few times to this therapist and I was just like, All I'm doing is talking and crying about my feelings in circles.

Yeah, and at one point she did suggest like journaling It handed me like a paper on journaling and I'm like, I'm not gonna read this No, I know I mean for people who like love their therapist and had the most amazing therapy journey Like I love that. I wish I had that's what I was seeking out.

Yeah, but it just hasn't been my story Yeah, I even with Ryan. I think we just go through enough time that we build enough momentum behind us that we just are like, maybe we know what we're doing. Look at this life. I'm very happy with where we're at now. And communication is huge, right?

Especially in a relationship, if you can communicate that stuff, I think that's maybe where a lot of people run into issues is not being able to communicate or even acknowledge those feelings. If you're just getting mad at him for no reason and never acknowledging that it was something deeper or something from before that you needed to deal with.

You'd just be getting mad at him and you'd just be getting in fights and he'd be like, what's going on? You don't know what's going on. And then you could see how it could go downhill from that pretty quickly. Yeah, life's just a trip. It's just I haven't like chronologically looked back at this in a long time and it is just wild.

So a recurring theme that keeps coming up in my interviews is if you could go back and either redo it or change it would you because, which is obviously a very difficult question because in, of course, like if you looked back, you would rather your mom be not bipolar, you would rather her.

Yeah. Ryan had stayed sober from the minute he met you or whatever. But at the same time, as we're looking back on our lives, those are the things that shape us. I'd like your thoughts and opinions on that. Yeah, and Ryan, he actually, I feel like, does this a little bit more than me. Before he got real bad into addiction, he had a professional MMA kind of run.

He was, like, being paid for it. He was a very  talented MMA fighter and Had a professional contract and then he started really getting into drugs and stuff. So he will say those things a lot. We're big UFC fans now and you can tell he lives vicariously through there's like a fighter that he'll watch his fights and he'll be like, I fought at a fight along with that guy it was the same age, same build.

So that's what he'll say. I know he thinks about that quite a bit, and I know he thinks about even still, his record does still affect his life. Not really anymore, but he can't own firearms. He can't there's a lot of things he will never be able to do because he's a four time felon, and that's just, so I think he has more of that because I don't really have a lasting impact.

I think it's human nature to be, like, I'd love a click a 15 second video to see what the other version would look like. The curiosity, I think, always, but because my story  Brings my, obviously my children into the world and thankfully it's, even if we had the kids and then we ended up growing apart or something, that'd be one thing, but genuinely in this very moment in 2024, I could not ask for anything different in my home life and circle.

So no, definitely not. But,  and I remember even like when I was, when I found out I was pregnant with Skylar.  I remember my mom making a comment about not keeping the pregnancy and stuff like that. And in the moment I was really angry at that because, oh my god, I love this man. Who are you to say that?

But I was with a three month clean addict. Maybe, I get where she's coming from as a mom. And he relapsed twice at that point, right? Oh my, he relapsed a million times at that point because how often do you try to get clean? But he had a long run that he'd gotten relapsed from.

Yeah, I think back to just like I look sometimes when my Facebook memories come up, the day I graduated cosmetology school.  It's like a dark day in my mind. I remember my mom was manic at the time. She was so embarrassing at my graduation and Ryan was really things were really bad and we slept in a really junky hotel that night.

I stayed with him. I didn't want to go home. I didn't want to be at my parents house. And so when those Facebook memories come up I just remember looking like tired and skinny and  Even nobody knew, like none of my friends knew, none of my family knew, like I think back to that version of Lisa and I don't know what I would have told her different, maybe a hug, maybe yeah, be like, you will look at the world different one day because it was just so bleak.

I think it's sad and unhealthy. But Other than that, no, I'm really grateful for who I am, and now I think that I have this business and this job because I just really fucking love people and find humans so fascinating. Same. Same. And, yeah I'm just, I'm glad that I have the experiences. I'm the person that looks at everybody in the airport and I want to know Are they going on a business trip?

Are they going to visit family? Are they There's like a word for that. What is that word? I've seen that quote before, like the realization that all the passing humans around you have a deep complex like story. I feel the same way. I just find human behavior and just stories so fascinating. And no, I don't think I would change anything.

I would maybe love to just Give her some love and make sure she was safe. But I was always I did end up being safe, but there was a lot of moments where I could have not been. And so that's scary to think back on. But  yeah, yeah. It's been interesting because almost everybody I've interviewed so far has said they wouldn't even though we're talking about lost parents and we're talking about, And there are some bits of it that you wish you didn't have to go through,  but that's different because, it did make you who you were today and yeah when did you  decide to go more on your path of self discovery and was there a turning point for you? 

Where you were like, okay, I need to work on some stuff or yeah. Like I said, I had my daughter December of 2012. Tony, I'm really sorry if this is also like hard triggering and hard for you because I'm going to speak very passionately about becoming a mother. So I just want to preface with that. When I had Skylar, I. 

My whole entire brain chemistry changed. I don't know, it was the moment that I had her pregnancy leading up to it, it was happening, but I just remember holding her and just being like,  my whole entire life up until that point, I just thought everything was perfect. Bad. The world was bad. People suck.

Everyone's horrible. The future's just a bad outlook on everything, and honestly I was a little bit of a brat, though, because my life was not that bad. If my friends or family listened back I did have a lot of great things in my life as well, but I was hardwired into negativity in the moment I had Skylar. 

It was just it was just the fog just lifted and it was, like, this is the most beautiful, incredible this is what life is about. This is the, this is it. This, I see now why humans recreate and why life goes on and why there's a greater possibilities for the next generation.

And just from that moment, and I was, just turned 20, a month after I turned 20, I had her. And from that point,  I was a much more positive person. She gave me so much life. It was wild to think back on. It was also like, wow, my frontal cortex was developing, so who knows how I would have turned out. Fun for her, but I remember that vividly.

And then, When I had Benny around that time too, I, is when I started following Brit and started just getting into hearing other people talk about the law of attraction and things like that. And then that put a whole nother spin on it. Now everything's not bad and negative, but now you can almost make things even better.

And then once I got a taste of that, of oh, I'm getting control of making things better and then seeing results right away.  I was hooked, and now that's my whole life. I just am obsessed with doing that, I could never imagine you being a negative human being. Everyone says that. Tawny, I literally used to have to I got in a fight in high school with this girl.

I pushed her into the bathroom sink, and I used to have to go to anger management in the middle of my school. I, and  that's why sometimes I even, I'm over it now, but when I first started posting and being public I used to be like, people from high school are probably like, what is this bitch talking about?

That is not Lisa Smith in high, in Plainfield that I knew because I just, ugh, I was just a bitch. I was a little bit of a bully. I was not nice. I was not kind. I was not. Good in a lot of ways. I'm sure people who love me would probably tell me there was good things. But looking back, I have a lot of like guilt and regret.

And I'm just like, what was my problem? But  I don't know. I don't know. Skylar helped and just working on myself has helped. And now I feel the quite literally the opposite of that. I think I hopefully only impact people in a positive way now. And yeah, that's my goal at this point.  Yeah. So you've gotten a little bit, into the woo stuff.

So do you want to talk about that a little bit for healing purposes? For somebody that's out there maybe looking for something that may work that's a little bit out of the ordinary that's not your standard therapy or your standard medicating or whatever. So I think that what I'm about to say, I also want to preface with.

I do see how this can also turn into toxic positivity, and I'm not trying to promote that either. Because sometimes shit is hard, and just reading a book that says, Oh, it's hard because you thought that it was going to be hard, and that's why it's hard, and it's not going to not be hard until you think it's not going to be hard.

What kind of chaotic, crazy shit is that? But,  I think that I genuinely do believe in the law of attraction, which is like attracts like, which means whatever  emotion, feeling, state of being you are, like, vibrating on or putting out into the ether is what you get back. And I saw it firsthand as soon as I  Opened up to that and lightened up and loved and expressed gratitude and gave and shared love and like what I was thinking, good things.

That's just my story. For me it was like reading The Secret by Rhonda Burn, which I know is just so cheesy and everybody like it's interesting, but like for me, I was just like, I never knew that was possible. Like I just would hear my, family talk about. negative shit or like politics or all these things and it was just like no like you can choose like what  You want to bring in and what you want to put out and just switching to like gratitude Always leading from gratitude and like anytime you find your mind, which again this can be tricky But anytime you find your mind really in a dark space In my opinion the soonest you can pull yourself out of that like the better Things are going to come to you.

I genuinely believe that. And that's hard too. Let's give credit to the fact that getting to that point.  is not an easy journey, right? To getting to that point of acknowledgement of, and I think it takes practice, right? That's why they call it gratitude practice and stuff like that.

It takes practice to pull yourself out of that stuff. It's not  easy. And, I think it gets easier over time, the more you do it, aka the practice, but the journey to get to that point is never easy. Never quick and easy. And yeah, I think for some people who are stuck in the depths of that stuff, because I've been, I've had those moments myself, like I literally have felt sometimes where I don't think I'm going to be able to pull myself out of this.

I don't know if I'm going to like I had one really scary moment. Last year, we were camping and I just my brain just like it was like middle of the night.  It was the first time that I'd ever experienced.  like I could have some more empathy for people who are depressed and suicidal and things like that.

Because I went in the middle of the night, my brain went to all the negative, all the bad things, all the things. And we were camping in we were in the Tetons. Great. Great. Teton anyways, National Park.  And so we had a 10 hour drive back home that day. And I literally sat in the car like dead silent.

And at one point Colin was like, what's going on with you? And I unloaded on him and I was a mess. And it hit me for, I want to say two and a half days. I had, I couldn't climb out of it. And you don't know what stem what start sparked that off? Oh I do. I was in the midst of a transfer an embryo transfer, and I'd had the transfer, and we went camping, and I was doing all my meds in the campsite, and,  which someday I can talk about all the fun places I've done meds, but, um, all that stuff.

And so we were coming up on that pregnancy test for that. And it just, because I'd been through it so many times, like my brain just went to,  I'm never going to be a mother. I'm never, this is never going to happen for me. And what if it never happens? And what if none of this works? And and it just spilled out.

spiraled into this hole that it took me, it was the first time in all this stuff. And I've been going through this shit for a long time, but I could not pull myself out of it for two and a half days. And and honestly, Tanya, let me say two and a half days is actually pretty impressive because I know at the end of that, there wasn't even.

a good news or a light at the end of the tunnel and so that's why i also think what you're doing right now is so important and let me also say  i've been on this journey or whatever that i talk about like where i've really grown into this and for only 10 11 years like skyler was more than 11 years ago really things were dark before then so i haven't faced a ton of like Really hard life shit, which I know is bound to happen.

I know our parents are gonna get sick, I could lose anyone at any point in time, so I don't know how I'm gonna handle those things, I hope that this has taught me how to be a better version of that, but I also, again, just sink into empathy that if you don't have the answer, I don't know if I do either, because sometimes shit is genuinely just hard, and that's that.

And we don't always, like we said before, you don't always need to put a bow or a lesson behind it or anything like that. And it may, depending on the thing, it may take a lifetime sometimes to I, yeah, I, there's people that say that even once they've dealt with infertility stuff, and I only speak to that because that's my, that's your story, my biggest part of my story.

And I've talked to women who've had babies and gotten on the other side of it, and they still say it, it's.  That doesn't solve it. That doesn't fix it. That doesn't make the emotions go away. That void is still there or something. Yeah. Yeah. It may be a lifetime of trying to heal from that, too. 

Just everybody's different. Everybody's story is different. And then different things work for different people, right? Totally. Therapy didn't really work for me, but, but a cheesy book about manifestation really did something for me. So who knows what it's going to be for you? Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Do you have any parting words? Do you have any words of wisdom for somebody who is potentially going through what you've gone through and Have obviously no story is the same but somebody who is you have any words of advice. Yeah, I guess I just want to say Thank you. Thank you for holding this space for me to really open up.

. Okay. Parting words for somebody who's in a similar situation. I would say tap into empathy as much as you can. If you are really relating to the angry child that I'm, like, if you have it and you still, empathy helps me a ton.

Gratitude helps me a ton. If you are in a moment where you're, like, so upset about other people's wrongdoings, empathy and gratitude. Like, how can you empathize with them? Why are they the way they are? How can we remove ourselves from that and let it exist on its own? Gratitude for what you do have and what is good and what even in that person that's you?

What is the good in that? Um, and I've also learned a lot about releasing expectations. I have found that's my key to happiness is not having expectations of others and just being good on my own without expecting and being disappointed by others. My favorite quote, it's on all my vision boards, it's something I always remind myself of, is expect nothing, appreciate everything. 

Some people that might be, like, hyper independent, not the best advice, but it works really well for me. I cannot be disappointed by anyone if I expect nothing of anyone, and I'm just appreciative of the good. And then, the hard stuff, I'll just go with it, and maybe that's, again, my hyper independence, and deal with that how I need to internally.

Yeah. I love that. Those are my advice. Yeah. Yeah. Life. It's the expectations thing is really hard. I think. Yeah it's hard to not have expectations of people and we all expect people to act the way we do or handle situations the way we do. And yeah, it's good. I love that. I just don't.

Yeah. I love you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming out and opening up and being vulnerable about your story. I really appreciate it. I understand that's not an easy thing to do. And I really appreciate it and hopefully, we help some people out there that are going through hard shit.

So yeah, I agree. Yeah. All right. Thank you. And thank you everyone for tuning in and listening and we'll see you on the next episode.