Facing the Trauma of Stillbirth, Melissa Saleh's Journey

Vallen Webb (: 00:01

Hey, friend, welcome back to the Pregnancy Loss and Motherhood podcast. We are on today with a guest, her name is Melissa. She is going to introduce herself and then we're gonna like jump into her story. Hey, Melissa, thanks so much for being here.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 00:20

Yeah, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Vallen Webb (: 00:24

So if you just want to like introduce yourself like how many kids you have where are you from what you do?

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 00:32

Well, I have two beautiful daughters, four and a half and three. had them during the pandemic, which for me was actually a huge blessing. I had them in my 40s with no fertility assistance after a 10 year unbelievably tragic and hard

rly miscarriages. And then in: 2013

Now my baby will finally be here and I've made it to the finish line. ⁓ The pregnancy progressed normally and when I was about a week away from my due date, I went in for a scan and was told everything looks good, go home. That was Wednesday. And then Thursday night, I went into labor. I labored throughout the night in the bathtub with my late contractions timer.

to determine when it was time to go to the hospital. ⁓ In the morning, I got in a cab. I was alone because my first marriage was deeply troubled, shall we say, and involved alcohol addiction. And there were big issues that I knew were issues, but I was having a baby. And, you know, I thought I'll have my baby and we'll figure it out. ⁓ I went to the hospital alone.

And the doctors informed me, you are in full labor, you're about to have a baby. And then they listened for her heartbeat. And at some point during that night, her heart had suddenly and inexplicably stopped. And they told me in that moment, ⁓ your baby has died and there was nothing that anybody could do. And they also told me you have to deliver her now or your life could be in danger as well.

,: 2014

Pregnant again with my first husband. I was in such a state where I felt the only thing that will keep me alive, the only thing that will make life worth living after this kind of loss will be having another baby. And I did get pregnant about a year and a half later. And in the second trimester, I learned that that baby had severe genetic abnormalities and likely would not survive to birth. So I had to face another horrible loss. After that, the dominoes fell, my first marriage.

ended, I had to shut down my first company that I had founded and was running at the time. I lost most of my friendships because everyone I knew was having babies and it was so socially isolating to be in such a state of grief and chaos and know, major parts of my life crashing down all the time. I was diagnosed with PTSD.

I lost most of my professional reputation, most of my net worth, and I gave away, after almost 15 years in New York City, I gave away most of my possessions on a Brooklyn stoop, got in a Volvo early in the morning, drove out of the five boroughs, and said goodbye to New York City. Wound up for a stint in Charleston, South Carolina, where I happened, my first husband had been from the South, I just happened to wind up there for a little while.

and then made my way to Silicon Valley where I was working with Facebook. I was working with the leadership team, including Mark Zuckerberg's team to create these big sort of enormous events that showcased what was going on on Facebook. And what was going on on Facebook? Well, some of the biggest groups on Facebook.

Vallen Webb (: 05:04

You

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 05:16

mother's groups and women's groups. And so I found myself interviewing the leaders of these groups, the admins as they're called, the administrators of these groups. And what were the biggest issues in their groups? Infertility, miscarriage, pregnancy loss, stillbirth, infant loss, birth trauma, trauma once, even if you have a healthy baby, having to go back to work too early, not getting support from...

spouse's parents and your social circle, ⁓ the financial struggles of not getting mandatory paid leave, having to go back to work too soon, the struggles of finding childcare. mean, how burned out you get by the modern way of having and rearing children in America. These were huge issues. I found myself at the epicenter here. ⁓

And from there, I made my way to LA, I met my partner and we went on during the pandemic. A week before lockdown, we learned we were gonna have our first child. And then that summer we founded and worked on and built an AI company and had another baby 16 months later. So...

My journey to motherhood was this chaotic roller coaster and it was very extreme, many, many women have really brutal stories. ⁓ and I have learned that so many women are living with so much past trauma, stress, constant stress now overwhelm.

It's like it doesn't stop. ⁓ So we said somebody needs to be talking about this and I guess that somebody is me.

Vallen Webb (: 07:18

Definitely. It's, well, I'm glad you are talking about it. I often find there's so much overlap with a lot of our stories, especially in the stillbirth community. ⁓ I know for me, same thing, 40 weeks, like five days, I went in, I was in labor, my husband was on deployment, so I was kind of alone, but I had my doula. ⁓ So she took me to the hospital and then of course, find out she's gone.

They, I like begged for a C-section because I didn't want to have to labor. I mean, I was already in labor, but I didn't want to do it anymore physically and emotionally. But they would not let me. And they waited till my doula left the room to like coerce me into doing what they really wanted me to do. And I ended up giving vaginal birth, you know.

which meant I got an epidural because I didn't want to deal with the pain. And then for the next eight, nine hours, I was like in and out, you know, and realizing like what was happening over and over again, severely traumatizing. And I know that's a story for a lot of us, no matter how we give birth to these sweet babies after they're gone. And then the isolation afterwards, I had...

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 08:24

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Vallen Webb (: 08:42

I had a bit of a community in the military community, the moms in our housing took care of me. ⁓ It took my husband five days to get home, unfortunately. Luckily he got home. mean, I'm not, you I understand, but I had a lot of people that just kind of slowly backed out. ⁓ They, you know, they maybe sent a text.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 09:05

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Vallen Webb (: 09:11

heard about that, I'm so sorry, like, but that was it gone. ⁓ And so that was like really heartbreaking. And then you're like, I don't know about you. well, okay. So yeah, that was your first baby. I had two girls about the same age as yours. They were there 18 months apart, my two oldest now. And they were four and three and a half when Evelyn had died.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 09:13

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Thank

Vallen Webb (: 09:38

So they were just going to preschool and our stop was at the bus stop. So like I had to walk them, you know, and of course there's like two other mothers who are pregnant about the same time, like, and I just hate them and I'm just so angry and I don't really hate them, but that's how we feel because it's not fair at all. There's literally no reason why this happened.

I was never given a solid reason. You weren't given a solid reason. think it's like 60 % of, 60 % or more of women who have stillbirths will never know why it happened. ⁓ And that's just insane to me. But yeah, I mean, I think the loss for us is a catalyst for some of us who can use it that way. I think it really depends on the person and like,

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 10:01

Nope, me neither.

Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Vallen Webb (: 10:29

how they see life and what the loss does to them. I feel I've seen a lot of people who, like us, we build something out of that. We try to change things, do all these things. And then there's some people that are just kind of stuck. They're stuck in that trauma. They're stuck in the thoughts and the feelings and just not wanting to live anymore. I mean, I was there.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 10:33

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

I've been there.

Vallen Webb (: 10:58

How did you get through that? Were there things that you said or thought? Did you go into mindset work? What helped you the most?

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 11:09

Well, first off, just want to say I am so sorry for your loss and your baby. I think one of the hardest sort of long tail impacts of these losses is that.

Vallen Webb (: 11:14

Thank you, Melissa.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 11:27

It's, I've had people say to me, well, she never took a breath outside the womb. So it isn't even a real loss. an invalidation and a denial that it even happened. ⁓ even though, you know, there are funeral arrangements, there are autopsies that, mean, this is the death of a person. And as a mother, you have to go through it. You also have to.

Again, this is a hard thing to talk about, but it is a reality for women like us. You have to face the fact that a human being died in your body. Like that is a really, we are not like, as Kendrick Lamar would say, not like us. Like, are women not like us? They just are not. They're just not. Who has been through that experience? Who has had a human being die?

Vallen Webb (: 12:12

You

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 12:24

and experienced, we experienced that death, whether we were fully conscious of it or not.

There was a human being and a soul and a beating heart, and then it was gone. That is the death of a person. I don't want to get into politics. I hate that any of this could even be politicized. That is such an insult to my daughter. It's an insult to all mothers. It's an insult to these babies. Like, don't you dare. This isn't about politics. It's not about ideology. This is about...

what is sacred and what happened to our souls when this happened. And I believe that nobody's soul is the same after going through an experience like this. I went to support, mean, to answer your question, what did I do? I mean, it was just ground zero. The analogy I use is my soul is a bottle and somebody dropped it from a fifth floor balcony. And when that's what it looked like on the ground.

And that was me. And I also like to say, look, like having, you know, money and support, like it shelters you. I had this loss and I was very, very angry because it was the time of Lean In. Lean In was very big. And I had started my own company and I had been working so hard during the pregnancy. And of course I blamed myself. Everybody blames you. everybody sort of implicitly, she must've done something.

And they distance themselves from you, even if they don't explicitly blame you, as you said, they distance themselves from you because it's this horrible, scary thing that nobody can understand and no one really wants to be around it. ⁓ And no one wants to confront the level of grief and trauma that a woman goes through when she goes through this experience. ⁓ I did not have living children yet. And I happen to have a

personality. This has been like this my whole life and my younger daughter has this personality trait. You tell me that something's impossible. You tell me you will never have X. You tell me you can't do it. Oh really? Hold my beer. Watch me. So that anger and that desire. I mean, I went to many doctors after that.

Vallen Webb (: 14:31

Yeah.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 14:52

to grief counselors, psychiatrists, all of them said, you'll have PTSD for life, here's your prescription, you'll never have babies naturally, go readjust your expectations for your life. And I was like, the fuck you say, excuse my language, like.

Vallen Webb (: 15:10

I

thought that was gonna be it.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 15:13

really? ⁓ really? You think that I'm weak, but like, I just have that personality. You think I'm weak. You think that mothers who go through this aren't strong. You think that you can just write a prescription and send us on our way. Do you have any, you have no idea what I have been through. You have, I mean, the doctors were so awful. I don't know. I have a real, I'm Jewish and I'm proud to be Jewish.

But there is a phrase in Judaism, kol yisrael, and it basically means Jews gotta look after each other. You gotta look after tribes.

Jewish doctor and let's just say that at one point during that experience I'm beside myself obviously and he looks at me and he goes this is hard for me too.

And I just went like, look, are you?

Vallen Webb (: 16:12

You can

swear. Don't worry. You're allowed to swear on here.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 16:16

I was like, fuck you. I was like, you're having a bad day at work. I'm losing my first child. Like, I don't know who you think you are, but like, I mean, I did go to a stillbirth and infant loss support group. There was one other woman that I knew who her second child, she had lost in this in a somewhat similar way, not quite as dramatic, but somewhat.

Vallen Webb (: 16:27

that.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 16:44

And she was like on the upper west side at this Jewish Women's Center. And there is a support group. It's not, you don't have to be Jewish. It was for anybody. It just happened to be at this organization. And there were, there was a man there, a father, his wife had lost, they had lost. And he was an NYPD detective and he had served in the military and he had been in combat situations. And he was like, this is

way worse trauma than anything that I saw in combat, like in the line of fire. And I was like, thank you. Thank you for acknowledging that about all of these women. And I am not trying to diminish the experience of fathers, but it is not the same, remotely the same. ⁓ That support group led me to two women who are absolutely extraordinary, who are two of my closest friends and who really got me help.

you get through that time. We had all experienced losses around the same time and we all lived in Brooklyn. We were all working and we had kind of similar lives and it was, this was our first child for all of us. So we were able to really hold each other for a while. And then I went deep into alternative healing, energy work and alternative medicine because I said Western medicine,

I followed every rule of Western medicine and I had this result. So Western medicine clearly does not know everything and Western medicine is not safe. Like I'm not saying I had my living children in hospitals. I'm not saying I don't believe in Western medicine. What I'm saying is that these practitioners and this system, because everything is a system and you have to look at does the system, was the system built for you and does it serve you?

And our medical system was not built for women. think we all know that. Like, why is there no male, like there's finally male birth control in the market, but it's certainly not huge. Why were there billions of dollars of research for Viagra? Where are all of the medications to help women during menopause, repair? I mean, it's just like, big pharma is very clearly not focused on women. I went deep into

Vallen Webb (: 18:58

Yeah.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 19:08

alternative healing, energy medicine, places I never would have considered before. I came from this very intellectual and doctors and Ivy League and blah, blah. And we believe what can be proven in the scientific method. And if you can't see here, touch or taste it, if it's not written up in a scientific journal, then it's not real. Well, I can attest that that is completely false.

because I did not use any Western medicine, medical journal techniques. And I became a fertile myrtle, for lack of a better phrase, at 42 and 43 by biohacking and using, and I trained in Reiki, I trained in multiple modalities. And I would work on myself absolutely relentlessly. I also sought out healers, teachers.

I trained very deeply in transcendental meditation. And what really got me out of it was my absolute insistence, I will have another baby. And so I had to get healthy enough to get pregnant again and to carry. And that was the only thing that got me unstuck. Yeah, that just like, I won't, you,

mess with me that much, you make me that angry, you screw with me that much. I won't stop. I will not. I've learned this about myself. ⁓ At this point in my life, I'm moving into a phase where I'm like, I would like to achieve these things, not from anger and not from like a desire to show you, but rather from a place of wanting to create from the highest truth and heal and help others. ⁓

But at that time, if you watch me was enough.

Vallen Webb (: 21:04

Yeah.

love your fire. Of course, I hate why you have it and you know what caused it but I can I can see your passion. Just your face your expressions your words. ⁓ I love that you're sharing all of this with us. ⁓

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 21:25

Thank you.

Vallen Webb (: 21:28

Yeah, so, there's so much. I see a lot of what you've done is, mean, you've taken, this is what I tell a lot of my podcast listeners, one of the things that helped me with my mindset is just taking radical personal responsibility for my life. I feel for me before, or after I lost Evelyn,

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 21:47

Mm-hmm.

Vallen Webb (: 21:57

I realized how much of my life I spent in like a victim mentality because of the way that I grew up and was raised. And I realized after like, I mean, this book, I don't know if you've read this one. I mean, it's so dirty, but because it's so old. ⁓ But that's like the book that I picked up before Evelyn had died because I had sort of been on a personal development journey before then, like three years before.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 22:02

Thank

Mm-hmm.

Vallen Webb (: 22:27

⁓ But once she died and I realized like I don't want to live this way anymore. I just just living waiting for something better. Thinking that somebody else is gonna do it. Somebody else is you know gonna make the money or do something you know whatever. And I'm like I have like nobody's coming for me. Like nobody's coming to save me type thing is what I started realizing.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 22:53

Yeah.

Vallen Webb (: 22:54

And then realizing that regardless of the loss and what it had caused and the pain and the devastation and the trauma, ⁓ I could still make my life better. I realized through all the mindset work and the people I listened to in the books, it's like, I get to make that choice. My life is the way it is because of the choices I've made. And so that means I can change it too, which is the greatest thing, right?

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 23:06

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's right.

Vallen Webb (: 23:20

So it sounds like you took personal radical responsibility, like and said, I'm not listening to you anymore. I'm gonna listen to how I'm feeling, what feels right for me, who feels right for me, like all of these things and you did it. Like.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 23:35

Yeah, I mean, I so relate to what you just said. And I think the key word you just said is feel. What feels right? We are not taught to make decisions from a place of what feels right. But that is absolutely the best place to make decisions from. And I have learned that in the I mean, my life is completely transformed today from what it was on August 14th, or August 15 2014. Like,

completely transformed. I am living the most beautiful, if you had told me then, I wouldn't have believed you. ⁓ And the compass, the only compass, because believe me, there have been so many times on this journey where I have been like, this isn't, I have no idea if this is gonna work out at all. Like I have zero idea.

Only real compass that has guided me here is does it feel good to me? Does it feel right? Does it feel healthy? Does it give me energy instead of take it? And I have trained myself in intuitive decision making. Everything that goes in my body, everything that

I put it on my skin. ⁓ Everything that I do, every choice I make, every person that I choose to associate with now, does it make me feel good? And by feel good, I don't mean the temporary dopamine of buying something or eating a donut. I mean like a deeper, that's the thing. Women like us, I believe we have a deeper access to ourselves.

because we went through this much trauma and loss. I believe that we, I would never say there's a gift in it. I hate it. Like I hate that, but.

Vallen Webb (: 25:28

I 100 % agree.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 25:37

I would also be lying if I didn't say Mia, my first child, completely changed my life and completely changed me and changed my entire family. My living daughters live the most different life and have such a different, such a better mother because of their older sister's loss and because she existed and because she left. I am changing and will change so many more lives.

because of that loss, because ⁓ of the catalyst and who it turned me into. ⁓ I also, look, my life going to zero at 38 was unbelievably hard and it gave me a huge gift. I got to get a redo on how I live life. Now, that was hard because I was 38. ⁓

But I will say I'm 46 today. I have not had any plastic surgery. don't, you know, do any of the things, but this intuitive living, I mean, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, I look better than I did 10 years ago because of all of the new ways that I make choices and the new ways that I live as a result.

And it's not just about aesthetics. How you look is a reflection of how you feel inside. So I am able to access so much more because I went through 10 years of just trauma after trauma, loss after loss, and then rebuilding from scratch. then, you know, when you're rebuilding, you get a little bit further and then it's like two steps forward, three steps back. Okay, now another two steps.

It really feels like that. It's not like, boom, I'm healed. It's like, I'm feeling better. And then a week in a week, another wave hits you. and it is such a journey and such a brutal hard one that if you make it through, you have walked through the fire and you are now like, I can do anything. I really can. I am superwoman. And.

That's a gift. It really is. My daughters, I mean, I tell them all the time, ⁓ I'm raising future leaders. I'm raising little girls who never question their worth. I'm raising little girls who are told, like, you speak up. You make sure your voice is heard. Your voice.

be the loudest in the room. I have never once told them quiet down. I've been yelled at in restaurants, tell your kids to be, and I'm like, no, I will not. My children take up space in this world. You want to know what I had to go through to bring those children in this world? Like those girls, they take up space and I don't care. I don't care who thinks what about it. Like the freedom from judgment is a gift.

Now it's not an easy gift. Being judged after a loss like this was so hard. And then, you know, everybody's got their opinions and judgments as you move along. People don't understand you. They don't understand why you make the decisions you make when you've gone through this level of trauma because they haven't been through it. And, you know, I was talking to a friend, a woman of color, and she was being very open and honest with me about every time I go into the world, every time I go into white spaces, I have...

to basically put on a mask. And I was like, I can only imagine what that is like. But I do know what it's like after the age of 35, when I lost my first, every time I go into the world, unless I'm with women like you, I put on a mask. Because they don't know. They don't know. They have no idea what I've been through, what I had to go through to get here today, the situations I've had to see and face.

The horrors, only women like us, nobody else knows, they just don't. And there's hardship in that, but there's also freedom in it because it's just like, all the moms are doing X? Yeah, I don't do that. That doesn't work for me. Absolutely don't care if people are gossiping or people are whatever, don't care.

And that's a gift. It frees up your life so much. Because as women, we could spend our whole lives worrying about what other people think. And we lose ourselves in the process. And we lose our potential when we're so wrapped up in what other people think, when we're afraid of criticism or we're afraid of judgment. Like honestly, I have stared death in the face. I have had to, yeah, like your judgment, seriously, I don't care. I don't care. Who are you?

Vallen Webb (: 30:53

you

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 30:55

Like, what do you know? Not you, obviously, but like, you know, it's just, gives you, if you can get to that level of strength, it's a superpower. It's taken an enormous amount of work. I'm not going to sit here and say it's easy. It's taken an enormous amount of work. And on the worst days, you know what has really helped me is I read a lot. work in tech. And so in this journey, in this particular startup journey,

I've worked with almost all men and like working with all men when you have two babies and your drama survival, it's interesting. But they really got, they teach me a lot of useful things. And one thing they teach me, know, high performance athletes, Michael Jordan talking on the, you know, I watched the last dance talking about there was, you know, this playoff game and it was do or die. And everyone was looking to him, but the night before he had ordered a pizza and who knows if they had.

⁓ spiked a pizza, but it had made him violently ill, like really sick, brutal food poisoning. He said, look, I had to go to play the game. I was no good in the first half. And he went into the locker room and they gave him an IV and he's throwing up. And he was like, I dug deep. I dug deep and I found a place. I found the strength. And he went back out there and he scored 35 points or whatever, and they won the game. It was playoff game.

And then you've got Mike Tyson, Mike Tyson talking about every day for years, you know, he was raised by a single mother who was a drug user. was raised on streets. Really, really tough childhood, really tough start. And he gets discovered by this boxing coach. And the boxing coach says to him, you're going to be the greatest in the world. Well, did they know for sure that he would be the greatest in the No, they had no idea. He trained in complete obscurity. Nobody knew who he was for years. He got up.

every day and he took punches in the face and he had no idea what the outcome would be. But he did it. Anyway, he got up every single day, boom, just to like practice boxing and get punched in the face. And eventually he did become the heavyweight champion of the world. And I think about that all the time. I'm like, okay, I got up yesterday and I took my punches in the face and I'll do it again today. Now it's getting much better. I no longer feel now that I get like now.

Vallen Webb (: 33:01

literal

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 33:20

it's like the clouds are clearing a bit and I'm moving. Eventually you do move into a new phase. You move into a new stage. ⁓ I call it trauma transcendence. Now I wanna mention you never transcend the grief. know, the grief is the love and those are our babies. There is no transcending that. ⁓ I don't know about you. I chose not to have a traditional funeral. I did not want...

a grave, I did not want a cemetery. I chose to scatter her ashes in a very beautiful place outside of Charleston on the water. And I visit that place on her birthday. And that is my way of connecting with her. And it really does. I feel it. I feel her when I step.

into that place. ⁓ You never transcend the love. These were our children. would say, you know, people would not understand what I was going through. And I would say, well, do you have children? Well, yes. Do you love your children? Yes, I do. Well, I love mine. She just passed at birth. ⁓ But you can transcend the trauma.

you can move into a new phase. And that is what I am doing, what I have done and what over the course, it took me 10 years, honestly. I'm not sitting here trying to say, yeah, I was great. It took me 10 years to really truly get to a place where I was like, I have transcended the trauma and I can now get up and see the world as a beautiful thing. It also took until my children were out of very early childhood.

I don't know about you. mean, you had your children already and then you lost. I had lost first. And so I don't know how it is for other women mothering. For me, the first three years of both of their lives were sheer terror. Every day. Sheer terror because you know, you know what it means to lose that precious. You know what it means to lose something that...

precious and I was like, I won't survive it again. And so my, I really did feel like my life was on the line for each of their first three years. Now we've gotten out of that phase and they are healthy, happy, you know, self-actualized children now. And that's a very different thing. But the terror when they were baby infants and babies, and I was alone. It was the pandemic and I was alone. did have my partner there, but I mean, you know,

We don't train men in this society how to care for women. So he did his best. Um, but I was, I was very alone during that time and it was terrifying. I finally, now that they're older, I'm like, okay, we have transcended that time and I can move into a new phase of life. I can go build a company that I want to build.

I can raise my daughters and create the family that I wanna create. And I can continue on and fulfill the destiny, for lack of a better word, that was sort of laid out by this trauma transcendence journey. That has taken a long time. People talk about, know, rock bottom and the dark night of the soul. I'm like, I had 10 years of basically of dark night of the soul. Like, I don't know what this dark night is. How about a dark deck?

Vallen Webb (: 37:12

I'm ⁓

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 37:14

⁓ I lost my thirties. I ended my thirties with nothing. No husband, no living children, no company, no job, very few friends, no more career. And my career did have a very beautiful continuation, but I didn't know that at that time. I had no idea how I would ever make money again. ⁓ Everything just went to zero at the end of my thirties.

Like, what has happened? ⁓ And I sprinted through my early 40s to rebuild. And now I'm finally like, okay, I can live. I have rebuilt and now I can go figure out, and now I can go step into the next chapter. ⁓ It has taken a long time and unbelievable amounts of work. And I don't know how to, I don't know what to tell women.

Don't give up. I recently did an interview with David Meltzer, who's, I think his audience is mostly men, but he's this business and life coach. And he said something to me that I really appreciated that no one had said before. He said, the thing about you is your purpose is greater than your pain. And that's what you have to have.

If you want, and not every, look, you go through something like this, there's no right or wrong way to live the rest of your life. I would never tell a woman who suffered a stillbirth or infant loss what to do. That is not, how dare anybody tell a woman like us what to do. We are the authors of our lives. And when you go through something like this, you get to choose, like you said, like, all right, what am I gonna do now? ⁓

I just wanted to choose from a place of strength. I didn't want to choose from a place of, well, society has cast me out and I've lost all my friends and I have PTSD and I've lost my money and lost my first marriage and the next pregnancy. And so I'm, you know, completely at the bottom in this society. I wanted to choose from a place of strength. So I said, all right, I'm going to get back to a place of strength. No, I don't know. Strength is...

I'm still getting there, I guess we all are. ⁓ But you get to decide, you are the author of your life and your experience. And when you've been through this much trauma, there's gonna be a lot of work to do because the trauma was making my life very small. There was so many things that I couldn't do, couldn't experience, et cetera, ⁓ because I had PTSD, because I had been through such severe trauma, because I was in such deep recovery, et cetera.

and

I just refused to stay there. I was like, no. It's that stubbornness, I guess. It's that, hold my beer. It's that like, no, I'm not done yet. You have not written me a, all you who wrote me off, you'll see. like, I am not done.

Vallen Webb (: 40:33

Yeah. When you were in that period where your girls were little and you I'm, I'm going to assume not that it's right, but like anxiety, like so much anxiety just about, and probably a lot of those, what do they call it? ⁓ Those terrible thoughts that you have that I can't think. There's a word for it, but ⁓ I mean, that's definitely, yeah, that's one way to say it.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 40:54

⁓ yeah.

Catastrophizing maybe is that the word you're looking for?

Vallen Webb (: 41:04

But it's like, I don't know about you, but for me, it comes and goes still to this day. I don't know if it does for you with your girls. But like lately, we are going on a trip to Ireland in like two weeks. And I'm terrified that I'm gonna get in a car, a plane crash, and my kids are gonna be alone. So all of these thoughts are flooding back for me.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 41:12

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Really?

Mm-hmm.

Vallen Webb (: 41:33

all

the ways that they will be hurt or left alone or do you still experience that? Like does it come at all or?

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 41:43

Yeah, I mean, that's residual trauma. I mean, I don't know how you can not experience that. I've developed ways of self-soothing and like, okay, these are trauma thoughts. It's not real. have to be my own mother, my own father, my own rabbi. I have to be everything for myself to...

Vallen Webb (: 41:58

Yeah, reframing.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 42:11

to soothe myself in a healthy way in these moments. I'm not reaching for something or doing some kind of behavior to self-soothe that ultimately hurts me. ⁓ I have had to develop very deep spiritual practices. Again, I do so much energy work. I do so much meditation in order to recenter and say, I am here. My daughters are here.

I control what I can control. can't control what I can't. I am present in this moment. I cherish this moment with my children. And I call in, pray if that's for lack of a better word, I call in safety, security for me, my children, my family. And it restores me to a place of, but I think it's totally normal.

I think that I don't know how you wouldn't. Part of, you know, taking excellent care of myself and seeing my children be strong and healthy takes away a lot of the anxiety. ⁓ I also come from a family, unfortunately, a pretty severe mental illness. My grandfather has had schizophrenia. Both parents have mental health

Vallen Webb (: 43:10

totally, yeah. I agree.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 43:39

Challenge both sides of the family have mental health challenges. So another terror for me was will my children be emotionally regulated? Will they be mentally healthy? And they are. And that to me is just an incredible accomplishment. ⁓ And so yes, the anxiety lessens the more I'm able to walk in the world and feel solid and feel protected.

did and ⁓

It's again, it's like you come back from trauma like this. It's a journey and every huge gift kind of has it has every coin has a flip side. So yeah, I mean, I can't imagine any woman going through an experience like this and then not having some anxiety about her living children. That just seems extremely

natural to me and also extremely hard.

Vallen Webb (: 44:48

Yeah, it is. It was the new trigger for me, or new activation, however we want to phrase that, but yeah.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 44:56

And

I also, mean, you mentioned, you know, rebuilding yourself, which is so inspiring. I mean, financial, the trauma pops up all over the place. It pops up areas of my life that I never had an issue with before the loss. And then I have this huge issue with after, I'm like, what's going on? Like, I never had an issue with this. It's residual trauma.

It's like, things get all, the brain is this, I like to say the brain is this quantum computer and everything kind of relates to everything else and everything's been wrapped up in everything else and you don't even know, like why would this trauma have anything to do with my financial health? Like what, those things aren't related at all. Well, if you go down the rabbit hole, there's actually a very deep, you know, something about support, something about my ability to.

and in this world, my ability to hold, you know, accountability for others or take care of others. Yeah, security, support, safety. And the other thing, once you get into trauma transcendence, that was very brutal. Once you start healing, it's very tough to stop. I had to go back into childhood. I had to go back into all the dark stuff from childhood.

Vallen Webb (: 46:02

security, safety, all those things.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 46:23

Um, you know, they use, don't know if you could, if you've heard of the ACE score adverse childhood experience, but it's a score. Yeah. You know, it's a score that they use now to basically determine how traumatized are you from childhood? Like how bad was it? And, uh, it's basically, you know, a list of certain things that could have, did you have an alcoholic parent? Did you have a mentally ill parent? Was there abuse? Was there, uh,

Was it wartime? Was there a tragic death, et cetera? And you keep going down the list. My ACE score is quite high. And I didn't realize that until I took the ACE test. And so once I started, and the other really horrible thing about women who go through stillbirth and infant loss is a lot of us do have very high levels of childhood trauma. I have not done studies and I don't want to make claims about one relates to the other, but.

Vallen Webb (: 47:03

to him.

Hey, that's interesting.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 47:22

or there's smoke, there's fire.

I then had to really start looking at all kinds of other things where I was like, didn't even, I didn't even wanna look at that. But I didn't really have a choice because I was like, well, now I'm on this train and there's no getting off till we reach the station. So I guess I gotta go back and tell this other trauma too.

and meditate through that and feel all the repressed feelings from that and process it out and acknowledge everything that was lost during that time. And whew, yeah, it wasn't fun, but I did it. And if others wanna do it, there's gold for you at the end of the tunnel.

Vallen Webb (: 48:06

That's a lot.

Good for you.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 48:17

You just gotta keep going. mean, you know, it's what they said about all the gold prospectors who came out to California during the gold rush. Like you didn't wanna be the guy who sat there looking, you know, tapping away, looking for gold for years and years and years and then quit an inch before he finally hit gold. And I didn't wanna be that guy. I was like, maybe I'll hit gold tomorrow. I don't wanna quit before I hit the gold.

because I've been doing this for years now, so I don't want to quit until I hit the gold. And I'm finally getting to the gold and it's a huge shift and it's a beautiful shift and thank God. But you do get there. I can't tell you how long it's going to take and I can't tell you what your journey is going to be because it's different for everybody. But you do get there.

Vallen Webb (: 49:07

You do.

It's, I talk a lot about mindset stuff because I think a big piece of it is understanding who you are. Like, I don't know, I mean, even as women, weren't taught how to, again, you were talking about our intuition, like listening to ourselves, listening to what feels right, what doesn't feel right, all of these things. So do we really know ourselves and like who, like what soul resides in our body? Like if that's what you believe, that's what I believe. But ⁓ it's...

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 49:43

I believe it.

Vallen Webb (: 49:44

It's really understanding that we don't have to believe the thoughts that come. They're not all true. They're, you know, they're things that we've picked up from all these places, the things that we watch and the things we read and hear. And it's just like getting down back to the basics of like who we are and going from there and getting there, though, like Melissa was saying, it's going to look completely different. Like what worked for her.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 49:50

Mm-hmm.

soon.

Vallen Webb (: 50:12

may not work for you, what worked for me may not work for you. Personal development may not work for you. Oh, you know, I mean, but there is a path forward, for sure. And it is long and grueling. I don't think it ends, but it starts to feel better at different points of the journey. I'm going on six years, you're just over 10. And this is where we are, right? We're still

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 50:14

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Vallen Webb (: 50:42

We're still here. We're still talking about it. We're still working through it. We're still trying to understand it. ⁓ Yeah, I mean, is there, I don't know, you know, is there, I did have a question. Did you ever do, are you into like human design and EFT tapping? Like, did you get any of those? Yeah.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 51:03

Yeah.

Honestly, I will do, I will try anything. I am a biohacker. I use myself as a data point. I'm like, all right, let's try it. See if it works. If it works for me, I adopt it. I have no like, I don't do that. Yeah, I'll try it. If it works. If it doesn't work for me, I'll do it as much, but yeah.

Vallen Webb (: 51:08

Yeah. Okay.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 51:33

If it works, sure. I really...

Vallen Webb (: 51:35

Right?

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 51:42

I lost any sense. I gave up any sense of like, well, this is good and this is bad, or this is legit, or this is not. I don't live in that world. Once you go down the does it feel good to me and is it helping me? You just go with that. I don't read scientific studies. Look, I look for practitioners who are the real deal.

I look for the absolute best teachers, the absolute best practitioners. you know, I make sure that anything that I'm going to try already feels aligned for me. And I've had enough experience with this now where I know pretty easily. But yeah.

I mean, there is life after this. It's such a different life. It really is. There's also, want to say, like, I have access to so much more of myself, as you mentioned, and the beauty of life. Yes, there's anxiety with these babies, but I love and appreciate these. I mean, I am able to...

bask in like the sacredness of my children because of what I had to go through in order to bring them into the world. There's no way I would have been here. I see other mothers and I'm in no way criticizing or judging any other mother ever. But they are mothering in a very different sort of mindset and experience and consciousness than I am. And that's neither good nor bad. There's no right or wrong. just is. ⁓

My experience, I am able to love them with an unbelievable depth and I'm able to attune to them much better. I think because I lost my first, so I learned to attune because I blamed myself so much. Why didn't you know? Why didn't you figure it out? How could you have let this happen? How could you have let her die on your watch? Like that was still such a painful thing. And it's where I have...

landed through so much spiritual work and so many conversations with every possible religion, etc. It wasn't up to me. It was not up to me. It just wasn't.

Hi! On that note, I think they're going to be making their way upstairs any minute. I don't want them to make a guest appearance.

Vallen Webb (: 54:32

Okay. Well, thank you so much for being here. You're inspiring. Thank you for sharing.

Melissa Lafsky Saleh (: 54:36

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for the work that you do and it's such a pleasure to talk to you. Bye.