Reclaiming Personal Power #248

Angela Coulombe:

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. And I have to say, prior to Lyme, I thought people who ran marathons were crazy.

Lael Couper Jepson:

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 identify as being a woman. So here I am, dedicating my professional life to this informing she changes, which I went on to do.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine radio show number 248, reclaiming purpose personal Power, airing for the first time on Sunday, June 19, 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. Gail Cooper Jepsen, author of A Woman's Living Prayer, founded the organization she changes to help women make important shifts in their lives. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Today in the studio with me, I have Angela Coolam. 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 in my 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 Coulombe:

Thank you for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Boy, you're a hard working individual considering everything. But 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 Coulombe:

Yeah, there's something about me, I think that is a little goal orientated and driven. And 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. And 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 done 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. So wanting to, 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. And I have to say, prior to Lyme, I thought people who ran marathons were crazy. I liken 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? But I think Lyme disease 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. And so this became my mission.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You were born in Maine.

Angela Coulombe:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But you spent a considerable amount of time actually outside of the United States?

Angela Coulombe:

Yeah. When I was 17, I moved to Holland and lived in Amsterdam for a while before moving to England. And 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 arts. So I'm very lucky that I have very supportive family. My parents, although at first don'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. Lisa Belisle:

You've been back in Saco for a little while now?

Angela Coulombe:

Yes, yes. We moved back in about 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. Lisa Belisle:

And your background in fine arts has led you to a career in photography?

Angela Coulombe:

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 sort of led me on the road to then go on 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 mil. We had medium format cameras, we had large format cameras, there were 10 by 8 plate cameras and we developed everything in darkrooms and. And 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. Lisa Belisle:

I want to talk about the Lyme disease because I think that's important in a lot of people that. Well, 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. So clearly it's an issue that people connect with and are impacted by in a pretty major way. But I also want to talk about kind of the. 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. And I would imagine that is impacted by your Lyme disease.

Angela Coulombe:

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. But 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. So Frida Kahloff, 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. But she went on to create amazing portraits and did a lot of amazing artwork from her bed. And 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. And, you know, when you are holding your camera, you kind of hold it under the body and the lens, and that hand would ache if I held it for more than 5, 10 minutes at a time. So 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. But 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. And so trying to still stay connected to the arts was probably easier for me than it might have been for other people in 10, 20 years ago.

Dr. Lisa 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 Coulombe:

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. And 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. And 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 mum from Maine who had a passion for living and, you know, embraced it and wanted to. You know, 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. And 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. Lisa 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 Coulombe:

Sure. Well, when I finished the beach to Beacon, which actually prior to Lyme, that was the furthest I'd 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 I tried to. It was my first sort of big 10k, and I really tried to push myself. So 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 kind of indicative of Lyme disease. So 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, though, 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 hipaches and I've got my wrists hurt, and I just. I just don't feel. And she said, not really. Not to the extent that you say you are experiencing. But then I thought that must be what going on, you know? And a few weeks later, then I started to experience really bad migraines, and I started to have nausea, 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 or you'd still wake up tired for some reason. And that's how I was feeling. But as a mum, 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. And 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. And 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, I actually finally got a bullseye on my upper arm. And then I had some smaller ones on my other arm and I actually had like the arrhythmic migrans, which is the rash that's 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. And 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. And that's eventually what got me to the doctor and got me a Lyme diagnosis.

Dr. Lisa 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 Coulombe:

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'm just really. 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. And 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 AR move and I couldn't use my legs to move. And 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. And that was it. Never had me back into the office for re examination or re evaluation. Never did any more blood work. Never. That was it. That phone call was the end of it.

Dr. Lisa 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 Coulombe:

Well, and the other blood work I have done, because they do do a lot of blood work. You know, they check for ra, they check for other things, they check for lupus, they. All of that came back negative. So 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, but 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. And 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? But I was so taken aback by being told we all have aches and pains, that kind of blew my mind. 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 it pain, and there are ways you can get through it. The days of Lyme 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 a leave doesn't touch it, Advil isn't touching it, Tylenol isn't doing anything. And how am I going to get through the day when I. I'm struggling just minute by minute to get through this experience? And I felt that was dismissed. There was no regard for that and what I was going through. But I thought, I have to get better. It's two options. Get better or. I hate to say this, it sounds dramatic, but get better or die. That's it. It was sort of that clear cut at the time. And 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. So 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, you know, the bacteria is very clever. It can go into different forms. It can go from asparakeet to a cyst to biofilms. And 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. Lisa Belisle:

And there aren't that many, 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 Coulombe:

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. And again, not knowing a lot about Lyme, I mean, I had to become a quick study. So 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. And there are, 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 taking 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. Lisa 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, in our offices, and she decided as a physician that she would rather move to New Hampshire and practice there. And this was probably before this legislation was passed, but 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. There's a problem there. So 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 Coulombe:

Well, and here's the thing. I mean, 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 under reported because a lot of people, 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. But 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 it's your. You have to help everybody. And 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 to 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. But you would think that that would be the desired outcome.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's very complicated.

Angela Coulombe:

It's extremely complicated.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And I think that you're taking a very balanced view of this because there aren't any easy answers. And 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. So you've run New York, Chicago, Boston and London. Your next major. And it's called. These are called world major marathons. This grouping.

Angela Coulombe:

Yep.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And this one, 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 after effects of Lyme?

Angela Coulombe:

That's a great question. When I made up my mind to run marathon, the New York marathon, again, the furthest I'd ever run was a 10k. But it seemed to me that that would be the only way to prove that, A, I wasn't older 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. So that became my goal. But having that goal, I think was it. I'm very goal driven anyway. So it really did give me something to strive for and it gave me some hope and some. Some positivity in my life where for a few years struggling and battling this disease seemed to. 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. But 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 and to, you know, when I finally started to be able to run further and further, thinking, like, how am I 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? And 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 Labonte, who I used to do taekwondo with. And I had to stop doing taekwondo during that time. When I started to recover, she said, you know, 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. And another woman by the name of Karen Frodier, 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. And 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. And again, she said she would. And this is a person I didn't know, just a person I'd seen running in the neighborhood. So 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. And between those two women, they really helped feed and fuel my passion for running. And 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. And it was a really empowering, strong feeling. And 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. That's. 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, earth shattering. And 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. And that was the proof right there at the finish line. And 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, do what I was doing, just kept me going and motivated me and gave me the inspiration that I needed to get there and to cross that finish line. And 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. Lisa 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 disease?

Angela Coulombe:

The website is LymeBuddies.com and that's L Y M E B U D d I e s dot com. And then the second way is www.thebig54lime.com.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I give you a lot of credit for having run all of the marathons you've already run and gotten through, all 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 Coolam, who is running five world major marathons. Actually six, it sounds like.

Angela Coulombe:

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. But, mom, if you're listening, plug your ears right now. But no, I really would like to do Tokyo now as well, because I think, why not?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

All right, so almost at 5, probably at 6, but I'm sure you will get it done. And I appreciate your coming in and talking to us today.

Angela Coulombe:

I appreciate you having me. Thank you so much.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

the office and on my desk there was a book called A Woman's Living Prayer by Lael Cooper Jepsen with a lovely little note on it and I said I have no idea who this person is, but on the book there's just wonderful photography of Lael Cooper Jepsen. So I said this is intriguing. I think I'll start reading it. And I did and today we have in the studio with us Lael Cooper Jepsen because I did actually really enjoy your book. 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 10 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 Sallies 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, A Woman's Living Prayer. Thanks so much for coming in today.

Lael Couper Jepson:

Thanks for having me Lisa.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So 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. And so it had access to like pool water and beach water.

Lael Couper Jepson:

It's well loved.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's well loved. And it's also evidence that it kind of kept. It was very thought provoking and it kept me reading through. I didn't. So I didn't put it down.

Lael Couper Jepson:

Yeah, I hear that a lot. It's a big book and I hear it doesn't read like a big book.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That's right. Yeah, that's true.

Lael Couper Jepson:

That's awesome. That's great to hear.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Now, one of the things. So in this book you talk about your own journey, essentially from being in the corporate world for many years and a field that really was more male dominated to finding your own voice and. And becoming aware that within yourself and within all of us really, we have male and female energies. And I find that really fascinating because I practice Chinese medicine and we talk about yin and yang.

Lael Couper Jepson:

There you go.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So that's really. That's inherent in.

Lael Couper Jepson:

Yeah, it's not a new concept, what I'm touching on. Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yes. But what you've described is really, is something that I think we still struggle with as a culture.

Lael Couper Jepson:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And this sort of dichotomy that we all, I guess, feel impacted by, you know, that women and men need to be a certain way in their lives. And it really impacts us.

Lael Couper Jepson:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Perhaps in a way that we don't

Lael Couper Jepson:

quite fully understand physically, emotionally, spiritually. Yeah, I'm pretty convinced it's at the

Angela Coulombe:

root of just about everything.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yeah. So back us up a little bit and tell me, how did this all start for you?

Lael Couper Jepson:

Well, 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 art making involved in that. And it really began in recognition. This sounds. So I read 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. And 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. It hadn't. And 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. And at the same time, I looked down and I was 10 months pregnant. I probably should not have even been at this retreat, but I loved it. And so I was very sort of ripe with child. So much so I couldn't even see my toes from underneath my belly. And it just struck me in that moment, that visual of I'm a woman. And it sounds so simple and basic to say that now, but it clicked for me in that moment. And 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? So there was the unraveling of that, and there was rage and anger that came up behind that and processing through that. So 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 and 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. It wasn't really working. So 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 identify as being a woman. So here I am dedicating my professional life to this, informing she changes, which I went on to do. And it was a journey. I've 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. And I was thinking, oh my God, what am I doing? But 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 served me well. So all of the work, the book that you hold in your hands is really the culmination of my journey of the past 10 years that has taken me to this point. And it began as a conversation about being woman. And then it, as I teased it out further, it began, 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 and then the feminine energy. What did that even mean? I mean, so it was, it was quite inside out, thrashing around. I call it a street fight on the COVID and an aria because it was totally inspired. And it's such an honor to have gotten that. I'm so glad it's out. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa 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 turning inward. And 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 red handed for excessive expression of passion, overstepping a boundary. Yeah, I mean, that's, it's, it's an enormous topic. And for me, there's the feminist aspect of. But then I think actually the suppression of anger in our culture these days, just in general. I mean, you can be a male, you can be a female. I think that it gets squashed. Yeah, so tell me about that for you.

Lael Couper Jepson:

It gets squashed and then it comes out sideways. So I'm an athlete and a competitor. I love competition. And so 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, but it hasn't. It's a really, you know, it's still fresh for me too. It's seeing, 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

Angela Coulombe:

is not a secret.

Lael Couper Jepson:

But I have been known as a straight shooter. I'm direct. I will tell you how I feel and when that is. It's often when I do that, I'm called vicious. I'm called militia. I mean, really mean spirited names that I have swallowed whole for most of my life. I'm the vicious one.

Angela Coulombe:

Wow.

Lael Couper Jepson:

My mom and I, I don't think she'd mind me sharing. Got in a fight once and I was telling her how I felt and she said, that's like being. I feel like I've been riddled with bullets. And I was like, wow, sorry. I mean, what do you say to that? Right? And when I unpack that I had to separate my, you know, there's the intention versus the impact. So I do a lot of. I've done diversity work, so I know she gets to feel the way she feels. And I need to own my impact. And I also. But I sat with my intention around this and what I found when I peeled back all the layers was my heart, which 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 said of myself because so much of I've been told I can be mean, I can be vicious, I can be the B word. You know, other women have called me that. I don't know if I can say that here, but you know what I'm talking about. And so 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 again through that side of myself that tells the truth, you know. And that's what Clarissa Pinkhole Estes writes in her book about the wild woman 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. Oh, my. Imagine the world we'd live in. Imagine the world we'd live in if more women harness that, more people. But starting with women harness that side of themselves. So that's what I've been actively doing really, over the last year, even since writing this book. I'm now living that prayer. So I'm constantly taking stock of where I'm participating in my own shi'. Am. And it's really a deep pool. It's not a quick conversation. I'm constantly catching myself there.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I think it's a. 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. And yet I think it really is so insidious. I think that it's not. What I often wonder is

Lael Couper Jepson:

how did

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

we get to the place where passive resistance or the nonviolence that someone like Martin Luther King espoused or Gandhi, you know, how do we get to the place where nonviolence became sublimation of all feelings that might. Might make other people uncomfortable?

Lael Couper Jepson:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I don't think that we ever were saying, you know, 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. And yet I think that what I see oftentimes is that everything needs to get kind of tamped down, whether it's anger, whether it's extreme joy, whether it's viewpoints that don't match up with other people. And so. But it does. It kind of slides around under the surface and we don't really have any way to actually engage with people anymore because there's like nothing. There's nothing left.

Lael Couper Jepson:

Right, right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So how do we get to a place of really genuine goodness? You know, we want to move forward as a culture to a place where we're really kind of squishing everybody, male and female?

Lael Couper Jepson:

Yeah, I don't know.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That's a big question.

Lael Couper Jepson:

It really is. And one of my. 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 sort of. That's another word that's come my way. Ruthless just triggered for me the passive aggressive nature, the pitting against each other. And I was fascinated by that so much. So in my classic nature, I'm like, let's go in and like, really crack that open. Let's double click that icon. And 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. And so what happened was it became even more divine. It created. And that's not what I wanted, so. And it wasn't fun. It was really hard, sort of sweaty conversation and 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. So that's not working. So I began my women's retreat homecoming, which I did three times over the course of the of six years up in a lake in Raymond. And I had 40, 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 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 and that it was a grand experiment and it actually happened. And so I remember after my first homecoming retreat, I know one of your guests is Jean Handy, and 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 enculturization 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, as she. I'm just getting excited talking about it. And so 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. But 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, ah, 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. We would because anger is different than violence. Anger is an emotion. So it's 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, you know.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And it's also something that men can't talk a lot about, which bothers me because like you, I have. Well, I think you have.

Lael Couper Jepson:

You have two sons.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Two sons. And you have a lovely husband from New Sweetie. And I have. 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.

Lael Couper Jepson:

A lot of men in your life.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

A lot of men. I mean, I. Equal to the number.

Lael Couper Jepson:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So I'm a big fan of, as I know you are, of humans. And what I see is, you know, 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 Couper Jepson:

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So 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 Couper Jepson:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You know, specifically the. The white man who seems to have had all the power all these years, but he didn't. He didn't take away the power of those of us women who are living now.

Lael Couper Jepson:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Nor did my, I think my. My ex husband or my significant other now or my grandfather.

Lael Couper Jepson:

Right, right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So. So I don't know. I guess this is not wanting to

Lael Couper Jepson:

pump more shame into the system, you know, like understand it's a delicate balance between understanding, privilege and not wanting to shame.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Exactly.

Lael Couper Jepson:

Additionally, and because that legacy that is passed down and 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 and I have a client of mine said she got my book in the mail and it came home and 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 COVID And he had heard about me and so he started thumbing through the book and he started reading it and. And then her sons picked up the book and they're like, who's this woman? You know, and they were looking through it and she's like, can I have my book? So 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. But 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. And so 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. Well, this, you know, 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. And 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. And 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. And 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. And the cool news is the spectrum is there's a broad spectrum of gender identification. So it's kind of. It's not that easy to have that conversation anymore anyway. So I'm delighted about that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yeah, no, I'm also delighted. And I also think, you know, 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 or we didn't have our own economic means. And now I think we have most 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. You know, all the excuses that used to exist, I think we've slowly kind of put to the side. And now I think we can all come to the table as kind of 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 Couper Jepson:

Yeah, it's how we measure worth in our society. I think that. So in the past, it's. 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 that sort of stuff. And I 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 at a board, in a boardroom or in, you know, 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. So 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, but I do a lot of work with women around using short statements and shorter ones. So I had a grad school professor, this amazing woman named Lucia Edmonds down in D.C. and she carried. I'm doing this with my fingers, like I'm carrying a very small object, like a period. And she would carry a period in her pocket. Wise, wise woman. She was in her mid-60s, and she would say these things and she said, and I'm just gonna place a period right there. And as a woman in my 30s at the time, I was like, oh, yes, you do that. Because it keeps the potency of what was said versus watering down it or sandwiching it with a preface and a disclaimer or, you know, all those sort of watery down words that have you lose the essence of what was said. Potency. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I know that we could just keep talking forever and ever. People will want to. I know. Read your book, A Woman's Living Prayer. How can they learn more about you and the work that you do with. She changes.

Lael Couper Jepson:

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. Women. 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. And so 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. But yeah, so more of that to come.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We've been speaking with Lael Cooper 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 A Woman's Living Prayer. Thanks so much for coming.

Lael Couper Jepson:

Thanks for having me, Lisa. It's been fun.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have been listening to Love Maine radio show number 248, reclaiming personal power. Our guests have included Lael Cooper Jepsen and Angela Coulomb. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Bellio. 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.