Transcription of Reclaiming Personal Power #248
Announcer: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program:
Angela: Knowing I did get well, wanting to be a voice for those people, wanting to advocate for them, wanting to try to do something to get hope to others who had the disease, that, with the right treatment, they too could recover and be well sort of is what led me on this quest to run these marathons. I have to say, prior to now, I thought people who ran marathons are crazy.
Lael: I did not see that coming. That was not a dream I had growing up. I didn’t identify as being a feminist. I didn’t ever identify as being a woman, so here I am dedicating my professional life to this and forming She Changes, which I went on to do.
Dr. Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio, show #248, “Reclaiming Personal Power,” airing for the first time on Sunday, June 19th, 2016.
How do we convert obstacles into opportunities? For each of us, the answer is different, but some basic principles, such as hard work, persistence, and ingenuity, seem to be universal themes. Today, we speak with two individuals who describe their process of reclaiming personal power. Angela Coulombe survived the debilitating effects of Lyme disease to run marathons internationally while raising awareness of Lyme. Lael Couper Jepson, author of Unscripted: A Woman’s Living Prayer, founded the organization She Changes to help women make important shifts in their lives. Thank you for joining us.
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Dr. Belisle: Today in the studio with me, I have Angela Coulumbe. In 2007, she had just finished running Beach to Beacon, a 10K road race, when about a week later, her right knee became swollen and she started experiencing mild joint aches. Within three months, she found herself mostly immobile from the undiagnosed pain. She was eventually diagnosed with and treated for Lyme disease. She was treated for two years, and over that time, slowly regained her mobility. Angela also developed an idea to recover, train for, and run a marathon.
Despite the massive setback, three years after her diagnosis, she ran the New York City Marathon. Now she is on a quest to run all six of the world major marathons to raise awareness about Lyme disease. On September 25, 2016, she will take on her fifth world major marathon, Berlin, to continue to raise awareness about Lyme disease and to raise funds for the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Educational Foundation’s Physician Training Program. She has already run New York City, Chicago, Boston, and London. She will run Berlin in 2016 and plans to run Tokyo in 2017.
Thanks for coming in today.
Angela: Thank you for having me.
Dr. Belisle: Boy, you’re a hard-working individual, considering everything. Even if you didn’t have all of the things that you’ve dealt with from a health standpoint, this is a big challenge you’ve taken on for yourself.
Angela: Yeah. There’s something about me, I think, that is a little goal-orientated and driven. Also, when I feel that there’s injustice being done, I feel like I need to do something about it as far as I’m capable of doing. It seemed to me, specifically from my own case of how I was treated when I was first initially diagnosed with Lyme disease, there was somewhat of an injustice to me, and I imagine that I’m not alone or unique and that a lot of other people are going through the same thing.
Knowing I did get well, wanting to be a voice for those people, wanting to advocate for them, wanting to try to do something to give hope to others who had the disease, that, with the right treatment, they too could recover and be well, sort of is what led me on this quest to run these marathons.
I have to say, prior to now, I thought people who ran marathons were crazy. I likened them to people who jumped out of airplanes. Why would you do something like that? You could potentially hurt yourself or die. If it’s not necessary, why do it? I think Lyme disease has taught me a lot about why people do do things like that, and why it’s important and the causes that they have behind what they do and what drives them to do those sorts of things. This became my mission.
Dr. Belisle: You were born in Maine.
Angela: Yes.
Dr. Belisle: But you spent a considerable amount of time, actually, outside of the United States.
Angela: Yeah. When I was 17, I moved to Holland, and lived in Amsterdam for a while before moving to England. I lived in England for 18 years, and I lived in Spain for two years while I studied at the University of Barcelona. I studied fine art. I’m very lucky that I have a very supportive family. My parents, although at first didn’t think they liked the idea very much, after a few years, they got used to the idea that I was going to move about and travel and see the world, and they supported me wholeheartedly.
Dr. Belisle: You’ve been back in Saco for a little while now.
Angela: Yes. Yes, we moved back in 1999, a year after my son was born, because really, Maine seemed like the best place to raise a family. Out of everywhere that I’ve been in the world, Maine seemed like the most suitable, idyllic place to bring up a family.
Dr. Belisle: Your background in fine arts has led you to a career in photography.
Angela: Yes. I studied photography at university. I started with a b-tech degree, which is a business technical education certificate from Brighton College, and that led me on the road to then go on to Nottingham Trent University to study art, and then that led to going to Barcelona for a couple years to finish off my degree.
I think photography has changed, obviously, quite a lot from the days when I was studying it. We didn’t have digital cameras. We had regular 35 mm, we had medium-format cameras, we had large-format cameras that were 10 by 8 plate cameras, and we developed everything in darkrooms. It was an exciting time when you had color printers that could print color and things like that. Watching the whole evolution of photography over time has been an amazing thing as well, but I’m happy we have digital cameras these days, and often wondered how we did so much without them in the past.
Dr. Belisle: I want to talk about the Lyme disease, because I think that’s important in a lot of people … You were saying, you came into the office here at 75 Market Street, and you weren’t here very long, trying to fill out the questionnaire that we always give to guests, before you had several people come up and start talking to you about Lyme disease. Clearly, it’s an issue that people connect with and are impacted by in a pretty major way.
I also want to talk about … It seems as if you have a very interesting mind and a very interesting way of looking at the world. Not only the travel, but you’re also an artist, but now you’re also a marathon runner. I mean, you have so many different ways that you interact with what’s going on around you. I would imagine that is impacted by your Lyme disease.
Angela: Well, interestingly enough, Lyme disease, when I was really, really ill, it left it very difficult for me to walk properly, to get in and out of bed without the help of my husband, to dress myself. Art is one of those things where it’s easy to do in a lot of different places, and it’s easy to create art even if you’re lying down. Frida Kahlo, for example, had suffered horrific injuries when she was a child. She was in a terrible bus accident, and she spent a lot of her life in a cast. She went on to create amazing portraits and did a lot of amazing artwork from her bed. I think that you can create art and do those types of things. There’s different ways of being able to do it and different ways to contribute.
I think my photography, that was hard to do during the time that I was sick, because my camera is very heavy, the lenses on the camera are heavy. It was very hard to hold a camera for long periods of time. When you are holding your camera, you kind of hold it under the body on the lens, and that hand would ache if I held it for more than five, ten minutes at a time. Doing long photo shoots was very, very difficult. Plus, having the stamina to do a long photo shoot was something I didn’t have at the time. There were just other ways to do things, again, because living in the digital age now, there was the internet, digital cameras, there’s apps on your phones that you can do things with. Trying to still stay connected to the arts was probably easier for me than it might have been for other people ten, 20 years ago.
Dr. Belisle: Do you think the fact that you could still be an artist and a photographer while you were dealing with the acute phase of the Lyme disease and then the longer phase of the Lyme disease, do you think that that gave you hope for moving through?
Angela: It gave me an avenue to express certain things, but what I really wanted to find when I was sick with Lyme was someone like me who had gotten better. That’s really what I wanted. I wanted to hear someone else’s story. I didn’t know anything about Lyme, and I didn’t know anybody else who had Lyme at the time. Actually, I did know one person. He was an English person. He was a friend of my brother’s. He played rugby on the same team as my brother. All I remember about him, though, is that he couldn’t play rugby anymore, and he was really sick and really tired, but that’s about all I knew about Lyme.
I wanted to know about someone who maybe was an average athlete and a mom and maybe local who’d been through it and gotten better, and I couldn’t find that online anywhere, but that was really what I was looking for. I did find the story of Perry Field, she’s an elite athlete. She’s a track and field star. She had Lyme disease. But again, she seemed to be in a different realm from where I was. I was just an ordinary mom from Maine who had a passion for living and embraced it — my sister says I have two speeds, on and asleep — and wanted to continue to go at that pace but found that I couldn’t. I wanted to try to connect with someone like that, or just at least hear one positive story about someone who had recovered from Lyme disease, and I found that very hard to find online.
Dr. Belisle: You were diagnosed shortly after finishing Beach to Beacon. Well, I guess, you had symptoms right around the time you were doing Beach to Beacon in 2007, and the diagnosis took a little while longer. Tell us a little bit about that process.
Angela: Sure. Well, when I finished the Beach to Beacon, which actually, prior to Lyme, that was the furthest I had ever run, was a 10K. When I finished it, my right leg started swelling up, and I really thought it was just an injury from running, because it was my first big 10K, and I really tried to push myself. I did what any person would do. Instead of going to a doctor, I went to a PT to try to rehabilitate what I thought was a sport injury. I didn’t know at the time that a swollen knee is indicative of Lyme disease.
I went to physical therapy, and after a few weeks where the swelling wasn’t getting any better, I said to the physical therapist, “Is it possible that my body is overcompensating for this injury so much that the rest of my joints are starting to ache? Because now I’ve got shoulder aches and I’ve hip aches, and I’ve got my wrist hurt, and I just don’t feel…” She said, “Not really. Not to the extent that you say you are experiencing.” Then I thought, “Oh, that must be what’s going on.”
A few weeks later, then I started to experience really bad migraines and I started to have nausea or upset stomach, and this fatigue came on — a fatigue that, if you’ve had children, as a woman you would know during that first trimester of pregnancy, you just don’t seem to be able to get enough sleep. You seem to always be tired, and it doesn’t matter if you slept 24 hours. You’d still wake up tired for some reason. That’s how I was feeling.
But, as a mom, I was able to also say, “There’s probably reasons for this. I have two small children. I have a three year old and an eight year old boy, boys, and I’m chasing them around and I’m bringing them to different events. One’s got preschool, one’s got school. He’s got soccer, he’s got basketball, this and that.” At the time, my husband had to go back to England to be with his mother, so I felt like I’m alone doing all of this.
Then we moved from August into September and my eldest son started school, so when the nausea started, I thought he’d picked up a stomach bug from school and gave it to me, so that was another reason why I wasn’t feeling well, and the stress, again, of not having my husband there I thought was playing into everything that I was feeling.
Interestingly enough, it wasn’t until three months later, in early October, where I actually finally got a bullseye on my upper arm, and then I had some smaller ones on my other arm. I actually had the erythema-migrans, which is the rash that is associated with Lyme disease, show up. My mother was coming over in the mornings to actually help me at this stage get the children ready because I was finding it difficult to do that as well as try to get myself prepared for the day. She looked at it and she was the one who said, “I think that’s Lyme disease. I think you need to go to your PCP and get that checked out.” That’s eventually what got me to the doctor and got me a Lyme diagnosis.
Dr. Belisle: You are raising funds for the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Educational Foundation’s Physician Training Program. As a physician, I know that we struggle with Lyme, and we probably don’t get as much education as we need, but I think there’s a lot of questions around Lyme. What was your experience with the medical community?
Angela: This is where it gets a little tricky. Again, I didn’t know anything about Lyme at the time, so I hadn’t gone online, I hadn’t researched it, I hadn’t done anything, because I didn’t understand that there may be controversy around it. I didn’t know that. I just thought when I got the diagnosis, “Hallelujah! Now we know what it is, let’s fix it. Let’s get better. I can’t wait to feel good again. I’ve felt terrible for quite a few months, and I can’t wait to feel better.”
What I got was I got three weeks of doxycycline that was prescribed by an infectious disease doctor. However, after the three weeks’ treatment, I felt more sick and more debilitated. At that stage, I couldn’t turn my head from side to side, I couldn’t lift my arms up over my head at all, I couldn’t raise my legs to climb the stairs or dress myself. I couldn’t get in and out of bed without the help of my husband, and even when I got into bed, I would have to ask him to roll me over because the pain in my shoulders and my hips was so great that there was no way to get comfortable, but I couldn’t do anything about it because I couldn’t use my arms to move and I couldn’t use my legs to move.
When I phoned back this doctor to tell them what had happened, I was lying on a couch, just really unable to move, thinking, “Okay, something’s wrong here, this can’t be right,” they said to me over the phone, “We all have aches and pains, and what you’re suffering from has nothing to do with Lyme, it’s just old age and arthritis.” That was it. Never had me back into the office for re-examination or re-evaluation, never did any more blood work. That was it. That phone call was the end of it.
Dr. Belisle: You’re not very old. I don’t know what “old age” means to this particular office, but looking across at you, across the microphone, it doesn’t seem as if we could really even attribute this to old age.
Angela: Well, and the other blood work I had done, because they do do a lot of blood work … They check for RA, they check for other things. They check for lupus. All of that came back negative. I was having a very hard time understanding how arthritis could come on so suddenly and so quickly and all over my body, not just in one spot. Again, I was terrified. I was lying on a couch, thinking, “What do I do now? I can’t move, I feel sick, but I have a family to look after and I don’t know how I’m going to get better.” There was that one moment of lying there, thinking … Just blind panic. “What do I do? How do I fix this? How am I going to get better? Do I phone back again and say, ‘I don’t think you understand?'”
I was so taken aback by being told, “We all have aches and pains.” That kind of blew my mind, as I opted for two home births out of choice. You can be forgiven for the first one because you don’t know, but if you do it again after knowing what it’s going to be like, you’re either a fool or it’s something that you know it’s going to hurt but there are ways of coping with that pain and there are ways you can get through it.
The days of lying when I was really sick were led minute by minute. Not hour by hour, but it was minute by minute. “How am I going to get through the next minute? This pain is so bad, Aleve doesn’t touch it. Advil isn’t touching it. Tylenol isn’t doing anything. How am I going to get through the day when I’m struggling just minute by minute to get through this experience?” I felt that was dismissed. There was no regard for that and what I was going through. I thought, “I have to get better.” It’s too options: get better or, I hate to say this, it sounds dramatic, but get better or die. That’s it. It was that clear cut at the time. I thought, “I want to live. I have a family. I want to be here for my boys, I want to see them grow up, and they need a mom.”
The search for what we refer to as a Lyme-literate doctor started, and it wasn’t easy. It was extremely difficult to find a doctor who understood Lyme and who understood the complexities of the bacteria, and was staying up with current research that was being done at the time that showed that the bacteria is very clever, it can go into different forms, it can go from a spirochete to a cyst to biofilms. It was understanding that perhaps, if you’ve had it for longer than just the day you found the tick and got treatment, there is a possibility that you may need a little bit more treatment in order to eradicate the bacteria from your body, and that seemed to be the type of doctor I needed to find to help me to get better.
Dr. Belisle: There aren’t that many of that type of doctor out there in general, but in Maine where our population is smaller, it’s probably even harder to find.
Angela: As I said, it was extremely difficult for me to find that doctor. There wasn’t a lot on the internet, there wasn’t a lot … Again, not knowing a lot about Lyme, I had to become a quick study. You do start to learn about groups like ILADS, which stands for the International Lyme and Associated Disease Society, so you start to learn about groups like that that are training doctors, and you contact them or you contact … They might put you in touch with someone else who had had successful treatment. There were ways and means to try to find someone.
However, until legislation was passed here recently in Maine, in fact, just last year, LD597, certain doctors who were treating outside of the CDC guidelines were sometimes taken before review boards and having their licenses suspended, so that was another big thing about this whole mystery around being treated and recovering, was knowing that that made it a little bit more difficult to find a doctor. Why would they want to risk losing their license?
Dr. Belisle: Yeah, it’s interesting because we had somebody on the show who talked about Lyme and also came in and talked about Lyme in our offices, and she decided as a physician that she would rather move to New Hampshire and practice there. This was probably before this legislation was passed. She was Lyme-literate, she was dealing with a lot of Lyme patients, and she had to go through exactly what you’ve described, which is, I think, put in place to keep patients safe, because if you operate outside of CDC guidelines, then maybe there’s some risk to patients.
On the other hand, if we don’t really have any other good options and we’re not offering anything to people with Lyme, then there’s a problem there.
Angela: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: What you’re saying is very true, and it’s a very real thing that I think doctors fear and something that we haven’t figured out successfully how to manage.
Angela: Well, and here’s the thing. Between 2014 and 2015, 1,381 cases were confirmed in Maine alone. 300,000 cases were reported last year in the United States alone, and this is CDC information. That’s a lot of people who are impacted by this disease, and I think that that’s even slightly underreported, because it mimics so many other illnesses, and sometimes tests aren’t reliable and it takes a long time to figure out what has been ailing people. That is a lot of people to treat, and so you would think that perhaps more education for doctors in general is a really great thing, in order for them to be able to help people.
I think the Hippocratic Oath states … I’m not a doctor, but I think it states that you do no harm and you have to help everybody. I would like to think that that help also means trying to see them through to the best outcome for them that there is, which would be a return to health or as close a return to total health as they’re going to get, considering what damage may have been done to the body or to the tissue or to the muscles or joints or things like that. You would think that that would be the desired outcome.
Dr. Belisle: It’s very complicated.
Angela: It is extremely complicated.
Dr. Belisle: I think that you’re taking a very balanced view of this, because there aren’t any easy answers. I love the fact that you are actually trying to raise awareness about Lyme disease, and part of what you’ve been doing with the running is to bring this awareness out into the general conversation, but also conversation with doctors. You have run New York, Chicago, Boston, and London. Your next major … These are called world major marathons, this grouping?
Angela: Yep.
Dr. Belisle: The next one is Berlin, which you’re going to run in September, and you’re going to do Tokyo in 2017. How has that been for you, to do this while also dealing with the aftereffects of Lyme?
Angela: That’s a great question. When I made up my mind to run a marathon, the New York Marathon, again, the furthest I’d ever run was a 10K. It seemed to me that that would be the only way to prove that A, I wasn’t old or arthritic, B, that I had a certain pain threshold that I was able of tolerating, and it just seemed to me I wouldn’t be able to physically do it if I hadn’t recovered from Lyme disease, the one and only disease I’d been diagnosed with. That became my goal.
Having that goal, I think, was … I’m very goal-driven anyway, so it really did give me something to strive for, and it gave me some hope and some positivity in my life where, for a few years, struggling and battling this disease, you had to … It affects you cognitively, it affects your mood. It’s very easy to fall into a state of depression. Art is a great release for that type of stuff, but I’m only human. Running was a very cathartic thing to try to do and to try to get back into, and I think this idea of even going above and beyond my comfort zone, having just recovered from this disease, was a very interesting thing for me to try to understand and to manage.
When I finally started to be able to run further and further, thinking, looking at the schedule for training, “How am I going to get through a 15 mile run? I’ve never even run more than six. How is this going to happen?” On the day that you achieve it and do it, you think, “Oh my goodness, I just can’t believe that happened. I can’t believe I was able to do that.”
Again, I have to give a shout-out to a couple people, though. There was one woman, a couple women in particular. One woman, Lisa Lebonte, who I used to do tae kwon do with, and I had to stop doing tae kwon do during that time, when I started to recover, she said, “I will run with you, and I will help you train. I’ve been through the training for a marathon, so I will be there with you and I’ll help you.”
Another woman by the name of Karen Fogodier, who lives in Saco, our sons were together on a baseball team, and I would see her running through the neighborhood, and she looked very good and very strong. I thought, “Well, she must be a really good runner, and I wonder if I asked her if she’d run with me, if she would.” Again, she said she would. This is a person I didn’t know, just a person I’d seen running in the neighborhood. When she would turn up for every long run, I would be absolutely blown away that this woman was going to run 20 miles with me for no particular reason, apart from the fact that she wanted to help me succeed in this goal that I’d set for myself, and that she was a passionate runner as well.
Between those two women, they really helped feed and fuel my passion for running. It sort of became like a rebirth with every run, feeling stronger, feeling healthier, feeling more confident. All the things that Lyme had taken away from me, running was starting to give back to me. It was a really empowering, strong feeling. Experienced marathon runners had all said to me, “When you cross that finish line in New York City, it is going to be a life changing experience for you,” and there was a part of me, a little skeptical, that was like, “Yeah, I don’t know. I think I just want to live. I’ve set the bar low. I just want to live through the marathon. I don’t think it’s going to be this big, earthshattering…”
I couldn’t foresee what it would be like, but they were right. Just that feeling of accomplishing something that three years prior, I could never have imagined or dreamed about, being so debilitated and so injured, both mentally and physically, from the disease. It just felt like release. It felt like liberation. It felt like I really have let go of this now, or I have overcome it. That was the proof, right there, at the finish line. I’m probably going to tear up now, because it still, even to this day, is a very emotional thing for me, to just think about what it was like to do that … And really not just for myself, but for everybody else who I’d met along the way who had Lyme disease who had contacted me, who had heard about what I was doing to run for them. Knowing that they weren’t where I was at, but hoping that one day, with awareness, with better-trained doctors, that all those people would be able to do what I was doing just kept me going and motivated me and gave me the inspiration that I needed to get there and cross that finish line. They all keep me motivated and inspired to do it again and again and to keep going, and to keep trying to do everything that I can to raise awareness about Lyme disease.
Dr. Belisle: Angela, how can people find out about the work that you’re doing and the training that you’re doing to promote awareness for Lyme?
Angela: The website is lymebuddies.com, and that’s L-Y-M-E-B-U-D-D-I-E-S.com. Then, the second way is www.thebigfiveforlyme.com.
Dr. Belisle: I’ll give you a lot of credit for having run all of the marathons you’ve already run and gotten through all of the things you’ve already gotten through. I have no doubt that you’ll be able to finish the two that you are looking forward to finishing, and I really appreciate the time that you’ve put into this and really providing hope for people who are in your situation and even people who aren’t in your situation but really need to know more about this.
We’ve been speaking with Angela Kulum, who is running five world major marathons, actually six, it sounds like.
Angela: Yeah, my mother wanted me to stop after Berlin. They added Tokyo in 2013, so back when I started in 2010, it seemed like, “Yeah, let’s try to go for that.” Mom, if you’re listening, plug your ears right now. No, I really would like to do Tokyo now as well, because I think, why not?
Dr. Belisle: All right. Almost did five, probably it’s six, but I’m sure you will get it done. I appreciate your coming in and talking to us today.
Angela: I appreciate you having me. Thank you so much.
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Dr. Belisle: Sometime recently, I came back in the office, and on my desk, there was a book called Unscripted: A Woman’s Living Prayer, by Lael Couper Jepson, with a lovely little note on it. I said, “I have no idea who this person is,” but on the book, there’s just wonderful photography of Lael Couper Jepson, so I said, “This is intriguing. I think I’ll start reading it.” I did, and today we have in the studio with us Lael Couper Jepson because I did actually really enjoy your book.
Lael: Thank you.
Dr. Belisle: It’s quite wonderful. She is the owner of She Changes, a Portland-based business that supports women in more fully unleashing their power to be architects of change for their lives, for their business, or as leaders within their organizations and communities.
As a certified professional coach with an extensive background in consulting and organizational change, Lael has worked with women nationally over the past ten years in her business making a name for herself and her She Changes community. Lael is passionate about storytelling as a means for women to not feel so alone, and has held countless local events such as She Speaks, Homecoming, and Mustang Sally’s to inspire women to share their stories and ignite courageous action.
Most recently, Lael wrote about her own story in her book, which I have in my hand, Unscripted: A Woman’s Living Prayer. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Lael: Yeah, thanks for having me, Lisa.
Dr. Belisle: The reason that this book is a little dog-eared is because I actually brought it with me on vacation, which is when I do a lot of my reading, as most of us do. It had access to pool water and beach water.
Lael: Yeah. It’s well-loved.
Dr. Belisle: It’s well-loved, and it’s also evidence that it kept … It was very thought-provoking and it kept me reading through.
Lael: I’m so glad.
Dr. Belisle: I didn’t put it down.
Lael: Yeah, I hear that a lot. It’s a big book, and I hear it doesn’t read like a big book.
Dr. Belisle: That’s right. Yeah. That’s true.
Lael: That’s awesome. That’s great. Great to hear.
Dr. Belisle: Now, one of the things … In this book, you talk about your own journey, essentially from being in the corporate world for many years in a field that really was more male-dominated, to finding your own voice and becoming aware that within yourself and within all of us, really, we have male and female energies.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: I find that really fascinating because I practice Chinese medicine, and we talk about yin and yang.
Lael: Right, there you go. Yep.
Dr. Belisle: That’s inherent in-
Lael: Yeah, it’s not a new concept, what I’m touching on. Right.
Dr. Belisle: Yes. But, what you’ve described is something that I think we still struggle with as a culture.
Lael: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.
Dr. Belisle: This dichotomy that we all, I guess, feel impacted by, that women and men need to be a certain way in their lives.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: It really impacts us, perhaps in a way that we don’t quite fully understand.
Lael: Physically, emotionally, spiritually, yeah. I’m pretty convinced it’s at the root of just about everything. Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: Yeah. Back us up a little bit and tell me, how did this all start for you?
Lael: I love how you describe it, just because it accelerated about 20 years of my life in a nice, neat, red bow, but it didn’t happen that way at all. In classic me fashion, it was quite messy and there was a fair amount of thrashing and artmaking involved in that. It really began in … This sounds so … I wrote about this, but it sounds so embarrassing, still, to say, is that I didn’t really fully realize I was a woman until I was 34 and I was pregnant. It has nothing to do with gender confusion or anything like that, it’s just it’s very telling to the degree I had disassociated myself from being a woman, because it hadn’t felt relevant. There certainly wasn’t space in my corporate world to talk about being a woman. It wasn’t acknowledged, and, in fact, in my own lexicon, I used stuff like “one of the guys,” and I fit in.
Until I got pregnant, and it was like I was outed, first to myself. You know, this was no mystery to everybody around me. It was really this internal conversation I had where I literally walked into this leadership retreat that I had done many times before, and for the first time, I just saw this. It was the top 150 leaders of the company, and I just saw this sea of white men in their 50s and 60s, primarily, and a few women, but all I could see was the predominantly white men. At the same time, I looked down, and I was ten months pregnant. I probably should not have even been at this retreat, but I loved it. I was very ripe with child, so much so I couldn’t even see my toes from underneath my belly. It just struck me in that moment, that visual of, “I’m a woman.” It sounds so simple and basic to say that now, but it clicked for me in that moment.
That was the moment that began everything, that changed everything, because I started to see myself as different and I started to get curious. The first part of my journey was to get curious of how that happened, and how was I culpable. How did I allow that to happen at the age of 34? How did I get to this place? There was the unraveling of that, and there was rage and anger that came up behind that in processing through that. It began with curiosity, it moved into anger. It had me start to look outward into the world and say, “Where are the women? Where am I out there? What’s happening?”
At the time, I had an advanced degree and I knew the statistics of the disconnect between women who are getting advanced degrees and actually accelerating into the C-suites, and it wasn’t really in the boardrooms, wasn’t really working. I surprised myself and realized that I wanted to dedicate my work in the world to working with women, which took me by surprise because I did not see that coming. That was not a dream I had growing up. I didn’t identify as being a feminist. I didn’t [inaudible 00:38:32] identify as being a woman, so here I am dedicating my professional life to this and forming She Changes, which I went on to do. It was a journey. I worked with a lot of men who I love and still love who were like, “You’re cutting off half your market share by just working with women. You really should think that through,” and I did. I was thinking, “Oh my God, what am I doing?”
Something wise within me has governed all of my work with She Changes, this book, and I’ve invested in that. I’ve often joked that that’s the key stakeholder in my business, that wise voice in me, and it’s served me well. The book that you hold in your hands is really the culmination of my journey of the past ten years, that has taken me to this point. It began as a conversation about being a woman, and then it, as I teased it out further, it became about the range of who I am as a woman and making space for the masculine energy in myself, which I had shamed a lot, and so asking myself where I participated in that shame. Then, the feminine energy, what did that even mean? It was quite an inside-out, thrashing around … I call it a street fight on the cover, and an aria, because it was totally inspired.
It’s such an honor to have gotten that. I’m so glad it’s out. Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: It’s interesting that you would talk about feminism, because looking back through the book in preparation for today, I really was struck by anger and, the quote that you gave by Gloria Steinem, “Anger is energizing. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward.”
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: Then you ask the question, “Why is it that when a woman gets angry, she is shamed? Nothing shuts me up faster than being accused of being angry, and I do mean accused, because it feels just like that, a charge of misbehavior, caught redhanded for excessive expression of passion, overstepping a boundary.”
Lael: Yep.
Dr. Belisle: It’s an enormous topic.
Lael: It is.
Dr. Belisle: For me, there’s the feminist aspect of it, but then I think actually the suppression of anger in our culture these days, just in general.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: I mean, you can be a male or you can be a female. I think that it gets squashed.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: Tell me about that for you.
Lael: It gets squashed, and then it comes out sideways. I’m an athlete and a competitor. I love competition. Having done athletics most of my life, I find a really great home for that in a lane on a track or in a triathlon, and that’s acceptable, and that’s okay. Interestingly enough, except in women-only events, which I have encountered. It hasn’t … You know, it’s still fresh for me, too. Taking in what people are saying about me … It started with my family. I have been called “vicious” by my own family, and I wrote about it, so they know I’m saying this. This is not a secret. I have been known as a straight shooter, I’m direct, I will tell you how I feel. Often when I do that, I’m called vicious, I’m called malic- … I mean, really mean-spirited names that I have swallowed whole for most of my life. I’m the vicious one. Wow.
My mom and I, I don’t think she’d mind me sharing, got in a fight once. I was telling her how I felt, and she said, “I feel like I’ve been riddled with bullets.” I was like, “Wow. Sorry.” I mean, what do you say to that, right? When I unpack that, I had to separate my … There’s the intention versus the impact. I’ve done diversity work, so I know she gets to feel the way she feels. I need to own my impact. I sat with my intention around this, and what I found, when I peeled back all the layers, was my heart. I have a very, very big heart, and I’ve had people tell me that time and time again, but I haven’t really owned that side of myself because I’ve been told I can be mean, I can be vicious, I can be the b-word that other women have called me that. I don’t know if I can say that here, but you know what I’m talking about.
It’s taken me a while to own my heart, and to marry my heart, I think I talk about it in the book, to snug up my heart against that side of myself that tells the truth. That’s what Clarissa Pinkwell at Estes writes in her book about the wild women archetype and the type of the feminine that is fierce and will carry her young around in her teeth and will thunder after injustice. When truth is said in that spirit, from that heart, imagine the world we’d live in. Imagine the world we’d live in if more women harnessed that — more people, but starting with women — harnessed that side of themselves.
That’s what I’ve been actively doing, really over the last year, even since writing this book. I’m now living that prayer. I’m constantly taking stock of where I’m participating in my own shame, and it’s really a deep pool. It’s not a quick conversation. I’m constantly catching myself there.
Dr. Belisle: Well, I think you’re right, it’s not a quick conversation. It’s not one that we could even cover, just you personally, in this short amount of time that we have for the radio show.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: Yet, I think it really is so insidious, I think. It’s not … What I often wonder is how did we get to the place where passive resistance or the nonviolence that someone like Martin Luther King espoused, or Gandhi … How do we get to the place where nonviolence became sublimation of all feelings that might make other people uncomfortable?
Lael: Right.
Dr. Belisle: I don’t think that we ever were saying, during the peace movements of the ’60s and ’70s, I don’t think we were ever saying, “People, stop feeling. People, stop being angry. Stop being joyful.” Yet, I think that what I see oftentimes is that everything needs to get tamped down, whether it’s anger, whether it’s extreme joy, whether it’s viewpoints that don’t match up with other people’s.
Lael: Yes, I agree. Yes.
Dr. Belisle: But it does. It kind of slides around under the surface, and then we don’t really have any way to actually engage with people anymore, because there’s nothing left.
Lael: Right, right.
Dr. Belisle: How do we get to a place of really genuine goodness? We want to move forward as a culture to a place where we’re really kind of squishing everybody, male and female.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: I don’t know. That’s a big question.
Lael: It really is. It’s a point of curiosity for me. When I first began my business, I had come from the corporate world, and I’d seen, and, frankly, participated in what has been called “women’s inhumanity to women,” right? The backstabbing, the ruthless … That’s another word that’s come my way, “ruthless.” Just triggered for me. The passive-aggressive nature, the pitting against each other. I was fascinated by that, so much so, in my classic nature, I’m like, “Let’s go in and really crack that open. Let’s double-click that icon.”
I did some women’s groups and I did some forums, and I was invited in, and it was so divisive. It was so repulsive. It was extremely validating to women who had experienced it and who knew it and who were ready to engage it. It was really repulsive to women who couldn’t even go near that topic. What happened was it became even more divisive. It created … That’s not what I wanted, and it wasn’t fun. It was really hard, sort of sweaty conversation. I thought, “I don’t want to do more of that. That didn’t work.” It wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t generative. It wasn’t life-giving. It was shaming and it was divisive. That’s not working.
I began my women’s retreat, Homecoming, which I did three times over the course of six years up in a lake in Raymond. I had 45 women each time, and I thought, “I’m going to have a different experience of women. I’m going to just trust all my instincts, and I’m going to create an experience that I want to have that’s going to feel different and women are going to taste it and feel it, and they can never again say they don’t know, because they’ve felt it. They have muscle memory of an experience where women have this really cool community, and they’re going to go and replicate it.” It was a grand experiment, and it actually happened.
I remember after my first Homecoming retreat, I know one of your guests was Jean Handie. She’s a very good friend of mine, and she was one of my retreat leaders. All three of my retreats, she came, and she said, after the first retreat, she said, “That experience with women,” she said, “If women were left to their own devices and they didn’t have the media and they didn’t have all this culturization we have, this is how they would have treated each other.” This is it. This is how we treat each other. It’s not needing to fix or rescue, but this large capacity to be with another woman as she shows up fully. I’m just getting excited talking about it. I did more of those, and I continue to do more of those. My book is the latest endeavor to do that, to send out a different ripple into the world.
I think in answer to your large question, we’re not taught … Anger isn’t named with women. There’s a book, Imagine a Woman, I think it’s called, by Patricia Riley, where she talks about, imagine if you felt, when you were younger, you felt this rage and you felt this anger, and some woman held you in her lap and said, “Oh yes, this is anger, this is what this is. You’re entitled to feel this way. This is not bad or something to be feared. This is something to be listened to, this is something to be with.” What a different relationship we would have to anger, right? We wouldn’t fear it. Anger is different than violence. Anger’s an emotion. We just don’t have a lot of space online in public forums to express anger and have it seen as with pride versus shame or fear.
Dr. Belisle: It’s also something that men can’t talk a lot about, which bothers me because, like you, I have … I think you have-
Lael: Two sons.
Dr. Belisle: Two sons.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: And, you have a lovely husband from New Sweden.
Lael: I do.
Dr. Belisle: I have my one son, two daughters, five brothers, a wonderful significant other, he is great. My first significant, my husband, he was also great. Grandfathers. I mean-
Lael: Yeah, a lot of men in your life.
Dr. Belisle: A lot of men. I mean, I equal to the number-
Lael: Yeah. I’m a big fan of men.
Dr. Belisle: Yeah. I’m a big fan, as I know you are, of humans, and what I see is, that bothers me now for the men, is that moving more towards giving women a voice, it has really, I think, impacted the men who weren’t the ones who took the voice away from women in the first place.
Lael: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: That’s what I really feel bothered by, is that my son would enter into a world where people are still angry at the white man.
Lael: Yes, yes.
Dr. Belisle: Specifically the white man, who seems to have had all the power all these years. But he didn’t take away the power of those of us women who are living now, nor did my, I think, my ex-husband or my significant other now or my grandfathers.
Lael: Yeah. Right, right.
Dr. Belisle: I don’t know. I guess this is just, like-
Lael: Not wanting to pump more shame into the system, you know?
Dr. Belisle: Yeah. Yeah.
Lael: It’s a delicate balance between understanding privilege and not wanting to shame additionally.
Dr. Belisle: Exactly.
Lael: Because that legacy, that is passed down. It’s been very interesting hearing from and watching the men that I know read, former clients of mine, people who have followed me for years, my husband. I’ll read aloud excerpts to my sons, and watching their experience of this book has been fascinating because it’s opening things.
I have a client of mine, said she got my book in the mail, and it came home. She has two sons and her husband, and her husband grabbed the book and said, “Oh, is this Lael,” and picked it up, because I’m all over the cover. He had heard about me, and so he started thumbing through the book and he started reading it, and then her sons picked up the book, and they’re like, “Who’s this woman?” They were looking through it. She’s like, “Can I … Can I have my book?”
I’m actually going to start gathering groups of men, and I have had lots of energy to do that around the years, to talk about this. It’s very interesting. My husband has a lot of feminine energy, and we often joke. I have an extraordinary amount of masculine energy, he has a lot of feminine energy, and I’m very much a woman and he’s very much a man. It’s been so cool in our family to uncouple the gender from the energy, which is so difficult. If you talk with a group of women about the feminine, they will immediately talk about being a woman, or they’ll come to the rescue, if you will, of men. Not the women in my community, so much, they don’t really have a lot of energy for that, but it’s amazing how synonymous that masculine is with male and feminine is with female. If nothing else, I want my book to open a different conversation, a broader conversation.
I was on my street the other day, and I approached a couple of my neighbors, two women who were talking, and she was talking about getting promoted and really negotiating her salary, and how exhausted she was. She said, “Yeah, there’s that masculine energy in me again,” because she referenced my book. I hadn’t thought of it in those terms until I started reading it. She just did it as a matter of course. It wasn’t loaded, it wasn’t charged, it lost its electric charge of shame or lily-dipping in it, qualifying it. It was so exciting to see because I want a new conversation. The old one’s not working around men and women. It’s just limiting, and it’s divisive. The cool news is, the spectrum is changing. There’s a broad spectrum of gender identification. It’s not that easy to have that conversation anymore anyway, so I’m delighted about that. Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: I’m also delighted, and I also think … I’ve also wondered over the years it has been that women were not allowed to have enough of a voice in some cases because we didn’t have enough education.
Lael: Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: You know, or we didn’t have our own economic means. Now I think we have many women who show up at the table, whether we’re educated or not educated, or have our own means or don’t have our own means, that’s become less of an issue.
Lael: Yeah, I love that.
Dr. Belisle: All the excuses that used to exist, I think we’ve slowly put to the side, and now I think we can all come to the table as equal human beings and have these conversations and just say, “You know what? That stuff, maybe it’s relevant, maybe it’s not, to your perspective, but it doesn’t mean that you have some sort of advantage in the hierarchy,” I guess.
Lael: Yeah. It’s how we measure worth in our society, I think. In the past, it’s education, it’s value, it’s how much you make, where you went to school, who you know, what you’ve read. It’s all this sort of stuff. I’d love to get to the place — and, it’s starting, it certainly is, I feel it, and it gives me great hope every day when I get out of bed — that someone could say in a boardroom or in a corporate setting, “Something doesn’t feel right,” and then just put a period after the end of that sentence. That would be so great, without referencing something they’ve read in particular. In the work that I do with women, it’s using a lot … I’m a very verbose person. No one has ever accused me of being concise, so this is kind of ironic. I do a lot of work with women around using short statements and shorter ones.
I had a grad school professor, this amazing woman named Lucia Edmonds down in DC, and she carried … I’m doing this with my fingers like I’m carrying a very small object like a period. She would carry a period in her pocket. Wise, wise woman. She was in her mid-’60s. She would say these things, and she said, “I’m just going to place a period right there.” As a woman in my 30s at the time, I was like, “Oh, yes. You do that.” It keeps the potency of what was said, versus watering down or sandwiching it with a preface and a disclaimer, or all those watery-down words that have you lose the essence of what was said. Potency. Yeah.
Dr. Belisle: I know that we could just keep talking forever and ever, and people will want to, I know, read your book Unscripted: A Woman’s Living Prayer. How can they learn more about you and the work that you do with She Changes?
Lael: Certainly my website, shechanges.com, and the book is available on Amazon and booksellers. I’m speaking a lot more. I’m doing a lot of interviews. I’m going up and talking at women’s colleges and women’s book clubs are inviting me in to speak. It seems, and I love this, that I’m not alone. I almost had that as the title of my book, “It seems I’m not alone,” because it’s the theme of my work. Women are hungry to talk about this, and I love that my book is giving them the forum to gather without me, and I love being invited in. Yeah. More of that to come.
Dr. Belisle: We’ve been speaking with Lael Couper Jepson, who is the owner of She Changes, a Portland-based business that supports women in more fully unleashing their power to be architects of change, and author of the book Unscripted: A Woman’s Living Prayer. Thanks so much for coming in today.
Lael: Thanks for having me, Lisa. It’s been fun.
Dr. Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show #248, “Reclaiming Personal Power.” Our guests have included Lael Couper Jepson and Angela Coulombe. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as DrLisa, and see my running, travel, food, and wellness photos as Bountiful1 on Instagram.
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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our “Reclaiming Personal Power” show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
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