The Real Lives of TBI Wives

Ep. 62 | Shelby can look at Erika, is eyes work and he does look at her.
But it is not the same
Before October 11th, 2020, he had a way of looking at her that she can only describe as a gaze. A real one. Where eye contact wasn’t just eyes meeting — it was presence meeting presence. Where she knew, without words, that she was completely seen by the person who chose her.
That changed with the brain injury and for six years Erika carried the absence of it without ever having a name for what she was carrying.
During a coaching practice her coach leaned in and didn’t look away. He held her in his gaze while she processed her grief, through the tears, through the silence, through the falling apart. Her group stayed with her and Erika looked away. Being seen that completely, after six years of being the one who holds everyone else’s gaze, felt like too much.
What flooded in was grief and shame arriving at the exact same moment. Grief for something she had been missing for six years without fully knowing it. Shame for wanting it. Shame that it was coming from someone who was not her husband.
In this episode Erika names the thing most TBI wives carry in silence — the longing for the presence of the person they married, the guilt that comes with admitting that longing exists, and the shame that tells them to look away every time someone offers them what they have been starving for.
This is about one of the most human needs a woman has to be seen, to be held in someone’s gaze and to have another person look at her and not look away when things get hard.
And it is about the slow, imperfect, necessary work of learning to turn that gaze on yourself.
Join Reclaim to continue the conversation

Ep. 61 | October 11th came and went this year.
Erika didn’t light a candle or journal or carve out space to feel the weight of the day. Instead she packed three suitcases, got her two younger boys and Shelby on a plane, and flew to Florida. She kept herself busy on purpose. And something she had been holding for six years finally let go.
This episode is Erika’s most honest account yet of what six years inside a TBI marriage has actually looked like. The early years of surviving, doing all of the things while drowning in a way she couldn’t yet speak about. Getting sober on January 1st, 2022, and what happened when she couldn’t numb anymore. The childhood wounds and the belief that her worth lived in her usefulness that the injury excavated and brought to the surface. The hardest work she has ever done, learning to love herself and what that healing unlocked in how she loves her children and her husband.
There was a  quiet release of the version of Shelby she had been reaching for, the destination she had been measuring their progress against for six years and the marriage she had been desperately trying to find her way back to.
She is not giving up on his healing. She will never stop advocating, never stop fighting for every resource and therapy and tool that might help. What she is letting go of is the grip of the expectation and the exhaustion it has been costing both of them.
There is guilt in that release. There is real and honest sadness. Her boys help care for their dad instead of playing football with him in the pool. They are growing up in a different kind of family than the one they all planned for. That grief deserves to be honored and Erika names it without rushing through it.
Six years in she is learning, slowly and imperfectly to fall in love with after.

Ep. 60 | TBI wives are the last ones on their own list. The appointments, the medications, the kids, the house, the paperwork, all of it comes first. And by the time everything else is handled, the idea of figuring out what workout to do, whether you have time, what equipment you need, and where to even start feels like one decision too many.
Mason Mattes built Cynical Fitness for a completely different reason, he was a former gym goer who moved to Omaha, stopped going, and could not find an app that actually kept him motivated to come back. What he accidentally built was exactly what TBI wives need.
Fifteen minutes or an hour and a half, at the gym, at home, at a hotel, in the garage, with no equipment or full setup. The app connects to your calendar, reminds you when you have a pocket of time, tells you exactly what to do, adjusts when you run out of time or skip a workout, and swaps out any exercise you do not like or cannot do, without making you start over. It adapts to you. 
Erika was one of Mason's first testers, and in this episode the two of them have a conversation about what it looks like to use Cynical Fitness as a TBI wife, including going through the motions on a Peloton for years, choosing the ride that would not yell at her, and what changed when she finally had something that told her what to do and pushed her to do it better.
Mason also shares the full story of building the app, a year of late nights, AI tools, no coding background, Apple's approval process, data security, and realizing he should have mapped out every single feature before he started building.
If you have been talking yourself out of working out because you do not have the time, the energy, the equipment, or the plan, this episode is going to change that.
You can connect with Mason on Facebook and Instagram.
And be sure to download the app to get started!
As always, join us at Reclaim to 'keep the story going'

Ep. 59 | Missi was not someone who slowed down. Women's group leader, youth leader, dance team coach, committee member, fulltime employee - on the go from morning until night, not knowing any other way.
She flipped an ATV after a family wedding in Texas while protecting her four year old nephew on her lap, neither of them wearing a helmet. A helicopter came and took her to Memorial Hermann in Houston, and the life she had built at full speed came to a complete stop.
Only at the hospital for a couple of days, she was told to see a cardiologist for her chest contusion. Nobody told her not to fly. Nobody told her to stay in a dark room. Nobody told her what her brain actually needed to heal and that gap cost her years.
In this episode, Missi shares what the long road back looked like. Eight years without driving. A jar of coins she uses to explain how her brain battery works. Vision therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, a neuropsychologist she saw for 10 years. A husband who called every single day on his way home to ask what she needed. A co-owned business she never saw coming that gave her back a sense of belonging and purpose.
She also shares what happened this past July when her 38 year old son crashed an e-scooter two blocks from home and arrived at the ER with multiple brain bleeds and a skull fracture and how everything Missi had learned the hard way about brain injury advocacy became the thing that got him home in two weeks instead of months.
And through all of it, the PIVOT method formed - Pain into perspective, inviting change, valuing connections, owning your chapter, taking meaningful action. A framework Missi built from the wreckage of her own hijacked life and now shares with anyone who needs it.
Connect with Missi on LinkedIn or text  720-771-1914

Ep. 58 | When Erika Brouillette pulled up to Hope Heals Camp in Nauvoo, Alabama, she expected to unload the truck herself. That is what she always does. Instead, people swooped in before she could figure out where to start and she just stood there, not quite knowing what to do with herself.
That moment at the truck was the first sign that this place was completely different from anything her family had ever experienced. And it only got more different from there.
Hope Heals Camp is a weeklong camp for families affected by disability and every room, every space, and every gathering is thoughtfully designed for every body. It is the culture. Nobody explains themselves at Hope Heals Camp. Nobody apologizes for their reality. Nobody manages other people's discomfort with their situation. Disability is not something to hide or minimize or get through, it is something to celebrate.
This episode is Erika's shares her families experience that week. The spa day she did not know she needed. Maddyx going from furious about being there to already planning next year. Layne dancing at the silent disco. Wayker wandering off to find his own friends in a space finally safe enough to let him. Shelby's CC Derek, a quiet surgeon who just knew how to care for him well.
It is also about the people who gave their time, Alex and Corey Fleeman playing the right song for every single moment, Ginny Owens breathtaking at the piano, Leann Morgan bringing brand new comedy tour material to a room that needed to laugh, and Amy Julia Becker hosting the entire week with real stories, real advocacy, and a continuous stream of me too moments for every disability family in that room.
Every CC and volunteer pays to be there, while campers pay nothing, because donors decided that disability families deserve a week where everything is handled and nothing costs them anything.
 
Hope Heals Camp
Amy Julia Becker
Ginny Owens
Leanne Morgan
Alex and Corey Fleeman
Reclaim

Ep. 57 |
If you have ever talked yourself out of a trip because the logistics felt too heavy, too complicated, too much to coordinate on top of everything else you are already carrying this episode is for you.
When the Brouillette family was chosen to attend Hope Heals Camp in Nauvoo, Alabama, Erika's first instinct was to drive. Seventeen hours later, Layne getting home from a mission trip to Mexico the day before, and a price difference of nearly a thousand dollars between Birmingham and Atlanta changed that plan fast.
Days of preparation, homemade tube feed made from scratch the night before departure, enough catheters and drain bags and supplements and motion sickness patches to cover a week away, a friend of a friend watching the dog, and a family decision to just stay up all night and get it done. Their flight was at five forty-five in the morning.
This episode covers everything that happened between that decision and the moment they pulled into camp  the wrong birthdate on Shelby's ticket discovered at TSA, the TSA Cares program Erika had never heard of before this trip, the packed Delta flight with zero leg room and the kind stranger who switched seats, the light rail in Atlanta with a wheelchair and no sleep, and the bright red Dodge Ram the boys insisted on.
It also covers the trip home, Mend coffee shop in Atlanta, the World of Coca-Cola, and learning  that traveling with a disability in Atlanta means someone will drive you from the rental car drop-off straight to your terminal door.
This is the episode with all the logistics, all the things she is passing on to you so that next time you think about talking yourself out of something you have one less reason to do it.
 
TSA Cares
Sunflower Lanyard
Hope Heals
Hertz Program
Come continue the conversation at Reclaim
 

In October 2024, Danielle Damrell was driving home in her neighborhood when a Ford F350 hit her head-on. Three weeks later, on the drive home from a family vacation in Tennessee, a woman flew through an intersection at 55 miles per hour and T-boned the rental car, throwing it 20 feet off the road.
Two accidents, only three weeks apart resulting in a  traumatic brain injury diagnosis four months later.
What makes Danielle's story different is that she walks, talks, runs a business, hosts a podcast, and from the outside looks completely fine. And that invisibility, that gap between what people see and what is actually happening inside,  is something TBI wives know deeply. Because they live it every day with their husbands.
In this episode, Danielle shares what it looked like to hustle through the symptoms because she had things to do, to watch her income disappear faster than she could hand off clients, to navigate memory loss and visual overstimulation and rage that made no sense, and to slowly surrender a life she had built at full speed. She also shares the unexpected gift that came from stepping into Erika's home to care for Shelby and what showering a man who used to shower twice a day taught her about gratitude, dignity, and what it means to serve from a full cup.
Danielle gives us all the reminder through this episode that we all are created worthy!
 
Be sure to tune into the Created Worthy Podcast to hear all the amazing interviews, sharing many amazing women's life stories
 
As always join us at Reclaim to continue the conversation!

Years of quietly filling in his sentences, moving things into his path before he could lose them, learning to read the overstimulation before it became a storm. She was setting him up for success without him knowing and giving him his dignity while absorbing everything he couldn't carry until she couldn't sustain it anymore.
Then came the brain scan and the moment Robert laughed because he finally had a reason 'I'm not crazy' 
This episode covers the brain scan that made it real,  Robert finding Marcus and Amber Capone, the four days in Mexico with a group of veterans, and the moment Becca flew to San Diego to pick him up and saw his bright blue eyes again for the first time in years.
It also covers what Robert built after, Athletes for Care, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit co-founded to support athletes at every level dealing with the mental and physical aftermath of their careers, and the work being done to bring Ibogaine treatment to the United States.
Check out what is happening over at Athletes for Care 
And, as always, continue the conversation over at Reclaim

Ep. 54 |
This episode has been in the making since the moment Erika hit record on this podcast.
Jeff Faldalen has been her coach for the last year and a half. He is the person on the other end of the phone calls when the ruts got hard. The one who told her to keep going when she couldn't see past today. The one who asked her the questions she didn't want to answer and waited while she found the answers anyway.
In this episode, Erika and Jeff pull back the curtain on what that journey actually looked like. Jeff shares his own story, a car accident at 19 that nearly killed his sister, a jewelry career that collapsed overnight, seasons of being suicidal, and three and a half decades of doing the inner work that eventually became his life's mission. He walks through his core frameworks, the V, the hero's journey, the four archetypes, the identity codex in plain language that meets a TBI wife exactly where she is.
This is the episode for the woman who has done the therapy, tried the support groups, and still feels stuck in a narrative she cannot seem to break out of. This episode is for the woman who is one straw away from the one that breaks the camel's back. This episode is for the woman who has been in survival so long she has forgotten what it feels like to be in creation.
You are one conversation away from changing the rest of your life and this might be it!
 
You can purchase The Identity Codex by Jeff Faldalen and join his community at  theidentitycodexbook.com - $27
Hear his podcast at The Potential Zone
 
And continue the conversation @ Reclaim with other women who get it!

Ep. 53 |
Nine days before Christmas, Meg Payne got a call from the police while she was at work. Her husband Alan had been T-boned by a truck on his bike.
She was 34 weeks pregnant.
What followed was two months in the ICU and rehab, an insurance company that tried to deny his placement, a baby born without her husband in the room, and a newborn brought to Craig Hospital two days later to meet his dad, who was sitting in a wheelchair and doesn't remember the visit at all.
Alan is now what the medical world calls high functioning. He walks, talks, and on a good day you wouldn't know anything happened. He also has bilateral frontal lobe diffuse axonal injuries, significant memory impairment, and an emotional regulation piece that has required Ring alarm systems, hidden car keys, a zen den built in the backyard, and strict boundaries that both Meg and Alan have agreed to honor.
Silas is four and a half now. And Meg is still figuring out who she is inside all of it - the wife, the mom, the physical therapist, the one holding every plate in the air.
This episode is for the TBI wife who is somewhere in the middle of that figuring out too.