Adonica Shaw of Wingwomen: 5 Things You Need To Heal After a Dramatic Loss Or Life Change

Heal your beliefs around shame. Shame is a tricky thing. It makes people think there’s a roadblock to freedom and balance when really shame is an illusion. When you’re healing, it’s your responsibility to identify the illusions in your life that are holding you back and create a game plan to overcome them.

The world seems to be reeling from one crisis to another. We’ve experienced a global pandemic, economic uncertainty, political and social turmoil. Then there are personal traumas that people are dealing with, such as the loss of a loved one, health issues, unemployment, divorce or the loss of a job.

Coping with change can be traumatic as it often affects every part of our lives.

How do you deal with loss or change in your life? What coping strategies can you use? Do you ignore them and just push through, or do you use specific techniques?

In this series called “5 Things You Need To Heal After a Dramatic Loss Or Life Change” we are interviewing successful people who were able to heal after a difficult life change such as the loss of a loved one, loss of a job, or other personal hardships. We are also talking to Wellness experts, Therapists, and Mental Health Professionals who can share lessons from their experience and research.

As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Adonica Shaw

Named as one of the top 136 Black Innovators in STEM + Arts by Wonder Women Tech, Adonica is an app developer and intentional wellness advocate. Shaw is the Founder and CEO of Wingwomen, a new health-focused social media platform for professional women. She is dedicated to cultivating digital spaces that inspire professional women to improve their mental health by dedicating themselves wholeheartedly to self-care.

Through her popular podcasts “I Surrender,” and “Self-Care Saturday,” she interviews guests like former White House official Bonnie St. John, and Renowned Psychotherapist and NYT Bestselling author Barry Michels, on topics about mental agility, overcoming adversity, and finding balance in high-pressure environments.

As a 3-time TEDx Speaker, Adonica has incomparable messaging and speaking ability and is powerfully unique at helping others define and craft the role of self-care and mental and emotional health while achieving professional success.

Her second book, “Shatter Your Own Glass Ceiling,” is being published in 2022.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?

I had a very humble upbringing. My mother was a single parent who raised my brother and me by working two jobs. We moved around a lot. I grew up in my hometown in Pasadena, California, but also in Glendale, Arizona, and Austintown, Ohio as well.

I moved back to Southern California when I was 14, about two weeks before I started high school at John Muir High School in Pasadena. We moved one more time during my sophomore year to Upland California, where I graduated from High School before pursuing my undergraduate degree at the University of California Irvine on a Div 1 Track & Field scholarship.

The collegiate years were eventful, to say the least. In addition to being a student-athlete, I had several internships with local tv news stations. I also participated in pageants and did some light acting for a while.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

This has changed so much over the years. But currently, it’s “When you are wrong, apologize. When you are right, be quiet.” I love this quote because it taught me to be mindful about giving my power away. I used to overcompensate for other people, and over-apologize or over-explain things just to keep people in my life. This quote is a gentle reminder that if I’m right, to hold space for myself, and keep my peace instead of hustling for the love and respect I can very easily give to myself.

You have been blessed with much success. In your opinion, what are the top three qualities that you possess that have helped you accomplish so much? If you can, please share a story or example for each.

The three qualities that have led to my success are authenticity, vulnerability, and tenacity. From the outside, those seem like odd choices for an entrepreneur to admit, but it wasn’t until I started to open up with people and be open enough to share who I am and what I think that I saw a shift in my career.

Tenacity, by contrast, will always be on the top of my quality list. Persistence and determination are the key ingredients to tenacity and without it, there’s no way to reach your “wins” unless you continuously work towards them.

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about ‘Healing after Loss’. Do you feel comfortable sharing with our readers about your dramatic loss or life change?

From the years 2017–2019, I experienced not just one, but several dramatic losses.

Throughout that 24 month timespan I:

• Delivered my youngest son 5 weeks prematurely.
• Experienced a medical condition called Pre-eclampsia.
• Experienced a mini-stroke.
• Lost my paternal grandmother.
• Buried my father (who had died years earlier) but was finally put to rest through my grandmother’s wishes.
• Experienced a car accident.
• Faced bankruptcy.
• Ran for office, and lost.
• Experienced several job changes.
• Went through a divorce.
• I relocated from my marital home.
• Became single, and became a single-parent.

What was the scariest part of that event? What did you think was the worst thing that could happen to you?

The scariest part was not having a strong support system to help me navigate everything.

This was a journey I had to take alone.

Don’t get me wrong there were one or two people that availed themselves to allow me to vent from time to time, but ultimately I had to figure out how to pull myself through.

At the very beginning of these things, I worried about how I (and my now ex-husband)were going to pay for the hospital bills for the NICU expenses on top of the rent.

How did you react in the short term?

In the short term, I did what every other strong black woman/ mom/ type-A personality person would do, I kept quiet and continued to maintain my professional reputation. At the time I figured if I just keep my momentum, eventually I would power through and make it to the other side.

After the dust settled, what coping mechanisms did you use?

To be transparent, the dust is still settling.

Loss is a process, and depending on your mindset when you’re experiencing it leads you to opt for different coping mechanisms.

There was a time early in my losses where I opted for a wine night with friends. If I was in a particularly good mood I’d try to sneak out to go run around the block.

As time progressed those things weren’t enough though. Eventually, I got to the point where I realized some of the people I was talking to about what was going on were not trained, nor equipped to help me navigate such large life experiences.

In time, I traded those wine nights with other people, for sober nights alone. While I did continue to work out, I got very honest with myself about the fact that the temporary feelings of elation that often came after a strong workout were fleeting. What I needed was additional strategies to help me learn from the past and chart my path forward, and for that, I pulled in the guidance and support from a therapist, life coach, and spiritual teachings.

Can you share with us how you were eventually able to heal and “let go” of the negative aspects of that event?

I’m going to reframe your question a bit because I don’t know that I fully believe people have an end date on healing, and if they do, it likely shows up as a realization after the fact. I don’t want people to get the impression that they can rush this process and expect to be over it in any fixed number of days.

What I will say is that people “let go” once they get comfortable with acceptance. Once I accepted that I could not change the past, and ultimately that all of those things took me on the journey of growth that led to my transformation and subsequent success, there was no reason to hold onto that hurt. At a certain point, we have to decide what we’re going to focus on, and what we’re going to allow to serve us.

Aside from letting go, what did you do to create an internal, emotional shift to feel better?

I allowed myself to sit in the joy of my “good days,” and the pain of my “bad days,” without treating one better than the other.

The emotional shifts happened when I realized that we’re not striving for the emotional extremes of happy, sad, mad, excited, etc., we’re striving for the emotional space that is created in contentment and balance in the absence of the extreme.

When we label our current life experiences as strictly positive or strictly negative we miss out on the balance we create in our lives by understanding these things must coexist for our ultimate healing and growth.

Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to cope and heal? Can you share a story about that?

The person who helped me on my healing journey is a woman I’ve never met. Her name is Dr. Nicole LePera and she promotes her work as The Holistic Psychologist.

Her work around the importance of re-parenting oneself and the process of healing helped me remove the lens of shame from some of my losses. Shame distorts things and can paint this illusion that you can never come back from hardship, and that once you’ve experienced anything that deviates from “normal,” that you’ve already lost in life.

Her work allowed me to see with new eyes and build a new healthier self-identity.

Were you able to eventually reframe the consequences and turn them into a positive situation? Can you explain how you did that?

Absolutely. Today a large part of my work comes from my desire to help teach others how to reframe their losses to lessons.

At the beginning of my healing journey, I craved validation. I needed someone to pat me on the back for overcoming everything I had been through. I carried around this toxic belief that people should somehow treat me differently because my life was harder than theirs and that they weren’t as valuable because they hadn’t faced, and overcome, the same challenges as me.

What ended up happening is that I attracted a lot of people into my life who only wanted to talk about how bad things were, and how we had all been wronged. This was fairly cathartic at first, you know, to get everything out in the open and gain respect from other people who “got me” But as time went by I started to see that while I was gaining a sense of confidence about overcoming my past, I wasn’t gaining growth to carry me into the future.

In time I started to swap out these “rant sessions,” for experiences with people who weren’t interested in regurgitating their past pains, but rather transmuting them and using it as fuel for their future.

These were the people who helped me find self-acceptance, and the growth I needed to move my circumstances forward.

What did you learn about yourself from this very difficult experience? Can you please explain with a story or example?

I learned that I had a very linear belief around strength.

I also learned that I was subconsciously blocking additional ideas about strength because doing so would have challenged my strong-black woman identity. Furthermore, it could have potentially disrupted my reliance on the identity archetypes that had preserved my family for generations prior.

Now that I’m on this side of things, I realize strength doesn’t only have one face. Allowing strength to be many things opens you up to the infinite pathways to inner expansion.

Being strong doesn’t mean you power through life’s obstacles like they don’t exist and then wait for the applause because you did it when others couldn’t or didn’t. Sometimes it’s being vulnerable enough to know it’s unhealthy to do so repeatedly when support is available.

Fantastic. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your experiences and knowledge, what advice would you give others to help them get through a difficult life challenge? What are your “5 Things You Need To Heal After a Dramatic Loss Or Life Change? Please share a story or example for each.

After a dramatic loss you must:

1. Heal your beliefs around shame. Shame is a tricky thing. It makes people think there’s a roadblock to freedom and balance when really shame is an illusion. When you’re healing, it’s your responsibility to identify the illusions in your life that are holding you back and create a game plan to overcome them.
2. Heal by forgiving yourself and others. Forgiveness sounds cliche, but on a metaphysical level, it is a release of energy. Similar to shame, it creates blockages in our lives and when we prevent those blocks to be removed so we can shift into a higher vibration, we hold ourselves back.
3. Heal your beliefs around what it means to be “happy.” Being happy isn’t the goal of life. Life is messy. Life yields lessons of all sorts when you realize you’re on a journey of learning, living and loving then you understand happiness isn’t always the catalyst for our biggest wins. I had to learn to challenge myself about what happy means, and who I would be if I never allowed myself to experience anything but that emotion. Contrast breeds growth. Allow it.
4. Heal your beliefs around “destiny,” and how and why we achieve ours. When things go wrong in our lives there can be a propensity to throw in the towel and give up and forfeit any future success to that loss or change. Learn to look at these dramatic shifts as a part of the plan, and accept that they are bringing you closer to your destiny, as opposed to blocking you from the life you want. Let pain be a part of the plan and know that the gentle flow of the universe will always conspire to bring you to your calling.
5. Heal your relationship with yourself. The hardest part of healing for me was reconciling with myself. In life, we run into all kinds of people and circumstances that instill different beliefs about ourselves in us. Sometimes this is good, but when things go really bad, or losses happen and we no longer get that validation and affirmation from others we end up feeling isolated and lost. In my healing process, I had to get comfortable with being alone, and being the captain of my ship. I had to be decisive and allow myself to thrive ( as well as make poor decisions) on my own — and be accepting of all of it. This was terrifying. But now that I’m coming out of that dark period I know when things get rough I can trust my guidance and be comforted in whatever outcome may show up. As an entrepreneur, you have to be comfortable with being a lone wolf. And surrendering to that truth, actually set me up for successes beyond my wildest dreams.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

It would be the movement for people to re-evaluate whether or not the things that make up their identity make sense for them currently. Sometimes we do this out of self-protection, but other times it’s because we don’t want the responsibility of re-creating ourselves.

When we allow ourselves to evolve, we naturally improve circumstances for ourselves and the world around us. We raise our vibration and attract different possibilities into our existence.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them. :-)

Hands down, Demi Lovato. Aside from her work, I love her tenacity, transparency, and vulnerability. She is someone I admire greatly.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

They can follow me or my company Wingwomen on Linkedin and Instagram.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!