(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hi, welcome to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm Allison from Abundance Practice Building. I have a nearly diagnosable obsession with helping therapists build sustainable, joy-filled private practices, just like I've done for tens of thousands of therapists across the world. I'm excited to help you too. If you want to fill your practice with ideal clients, we have loads of free resources and paid support.
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With over 100,000 therapists using their platform, they've been able to stay incredibly successful and they don't have to sacrifice your experience to stay there. You can try two months free at therapynotes .com with the coupon code ABUNDANT. Welcome back to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm your host, Allison Pereer, and I'm here with Julia Colangelo. Julia and I have a long and storied history.
She was in one of my practice building groups and built her practice beautifully and then shifted over to coaching and helps people with flow. Then she became my coach. I got to go out to Hawaii and learn from her and be with her and work with her in a number of capacities. Julia has been both a student and a mentor of mine and was somebody that I reached out to a good bit after Helene because as you will hear, Julia has been through hell with her own natural disaster.
But thank you for being here, Julia. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. I think this is such an important topic to discuss as practice owners and as clinicians and as disaster survivors. Yeah. Yeah. Can you do a description of what happened in your disaster? Yeah. Over 18 months ago, it felt like before that I had some other issues that were just lingering from some chronic health stuff that became more acute. We survived the Maui wildfires, specifically in Lahaina.
There were three wildfires that day, Olinda, Kula, and Lahaina. Lahaina was the largest one. The fires were caused by the neglect of the electrical in the whole town. Because of that and wind, this fire took out the entire town. And neighborhoods surrounding Lahaina town specifically. So overnight, I went from small business owner with a successful steady business to losing almost all of my IP on electrical devices and different hard drives that I had and podcast equipment.
Everything, losing everything in an instant, very abruptly and unexpectedly with no real preparation time. And needing to have this short term, I would say midterm. And then now, I would say I'm just entering the longer term recovery of what it looks like to try to build something differently after needing to face very abrupt, unexpected trauma, danger, and loss. Yeah. And it wasn't just your business affected. You lost your home. You lost your car.
You and your two kids and your partner fled in a car. Oh, yes. We lost our home. We lost the schools. We fled in a car. We made it out. The New York Times stamp said that we were two minutes away from it. It was already the fire was on our street, but the wind was blowing down our street another direction. But it was on our street. And it took us four hours to flee what would have taken about 30 minutes to get to safety. And I actually saw our home in flames from a rooftop in the neighborhood.
But I still thought in what we do throughout trauma, oh, I'll just come back tomorrow. This can't be real. And they were not even one, 11 months old and four years old at the time, our daughters. And of course, I was the parent who promised and reassured that nothing would happen. So one of the long term things is building back the trust of thinking some everything's going to be okay. And then not because of what I did or didn't do. Things are still not okay.
And that's something that I just never expected to have to deal with, with children at such a young age, and with owning a business and not having any real playbook for how much and how severely this would impact my ability to run a business. Yeah. I'm in the, I guess, late early or early mid stage. So, oh, I'm going to cry because that's what you do in the state. This can be part one of us feeling our feelings.
Yeah. And we're five months out, five months in two days of when we're recording this, we're five months out from Helene and the destruction is still everywhere. It's driving past the destruction every day has been kind of exposure therapy over time. I'm like, oh yeah, there's a shell of those buildings and the buildings that are completely gone and that kind of thing. But everybody I know lost someone, lost a job or lost a business they owned. Everybody knows somebody I should say. Of course.
So, it's this ongoing, interesting trauma that as a business owner and as somebody whose house had, we've got tens of thousands of dollars of damage, but it's like nothing compared to other people. There's the survivor's guilt. I was going to say you have that added layer where it was almost, it wasn't easier, but it was to know that it was a complete loss, gave the closure and shortened my sentences, which when I was communicating, I could just say, yep, we lost it all.
It wasn't, well, we lost this, but not that, but this, not that. It was, we got out with one of the cars and the beach umbrellas that were in the car by chance. Close on your back. Yeah. I reached out to you to do this podcast when the LA fires were still raging and probably by the time this airs, it will be another disaster somewhere. Of course. So, I think it's good for therapists to hear you're not alone.
I reached out to some Katrina therapists back when I was like, I don't even know how do I sit with people when I can barely talk about it without crying. Yeah. And I had to make the decision to stop sitting with people. Yeah. Or in some ways it felt like the decision was made for me that it was shocking as someone who has learned from you for many, many years, you've instilled this vision of an ideal client of having a niche of focus.
And I've done that successfully in multiple businesses and through different programs and approaches and roadmaps. And to still have the cold shoulder happen from a few clients, you know, the week of the fires, I refunded on my own accord, probably $20,000 worth of retreats, deposits that were folks planning to come to Maui. But then other people straight up requested a refund for other services that I was probably pretty well equipped to still deliver. And that was very dysregulating.
And my confidence shrunk so much afterwards because it felt like I had set things up as well as possible and yet nothing could have prepared me for what the, again, short, midterm, long-term, and then very long-term effects would be on my sense of self as a business owner, surviving a public disaster that I literally couldn't hide or escape from. And then there were other clients who were saying things like, Oh, keep the money. Don't deliver the service.
Let's put a pin in it, you know, or here, I don't need any service. Can I, how can I support you? So I think that as you've probably seen the five months, six month to eight month mark is when things get real. The world forgets, the world moves on. You cannot move on because physically and emotionally you are impacted on a daily basis. And there isn't really a playbook that outlines what it does, again, to those of us that are public faces or the creators or the owners of the business.
We're used to showing up. We're used to showing up and being real. And when the real is so unbearably painful, you know, we, we have to take that step back. And that's what, again, I had to just remove myself to self-preserve and to take care of my basic needs and my family. But you can imagine, I mean, it shrunk my business so quickly that it made me question how successful was that business ever to begin with, right? Just changed how I viewed myself.
And that was one of the impacts I really didn't expect or to have to say the truth, which was, I'm not okay. Things are still bad for such a long amount of time. I keep thinking about the folks in LA that happened. I was actually right outside of LA when it started. So that was January. Yeah. And so there's this sweet period after any disaster where everybody comes together and supports each other. There was so much giving. There's like, I mean, my, my heart broke open, right? But that fades.
People forget. And the cohesion fades because people have to leave when they no longer have jobs and no longer have homes. They have to go elsewhere. And I know in places like where you and I live, it's certainly more expensive in Maui, but it's pretty expensive to live in Nashville. So many people who lost their jobs, but still had their apartment that they were renting or whatever, couldn't afford it because nobody was hiring. Nobody's open.
So even the businesses that the building survived, a lot of the businesses inside of it didn't. Because when you don't have water for months, you can't really run your restaurant very easily. So we lost a lot of good businesses in addition to a lot of really beautiful places. And so having clients who were just fine financially, it was not a problem, but they lost everything.
And now, you know, so we're doing pro bono with those folks in the group practice, but it feels very similar to COVID, but like the volume turned way up. You're going through the same thing as your clients. And a lot of people, unfortunately, can't step away from one-on-one because it's their whole business model and they can't pay their bills without it. I watched a lot of actual therapists be like, I'll do pro bono work with people like week one. And I was like, you can't, you really can't.
You really can't do that. Yeah. And what I want to plant the seed is that you can do it down the road.
And this disaster recovery is so long-term that now, and even six months ago, I was able to come back to life and say, now I can give, now things have restabilized in some ways, finally, not always, but in some ways, but I'll never forget right after the fire going to, you know, with the kids and with Chris, we went to volunteer, it was like three days after, but we also needed the clothing that they were handing out, right?
It was such, and I just froze and said, this actually isn't the time that for me to be the volunteer. This is in my nature. This is in my strength set that I can show up and I can help other people. And this is not the time right now. I need to focus inward and with my inner circle and with our actual community. And I need to let myself heal. And from a business perspective, it meant having a lot of very hard and abrupt conversations with my team saying, this is never what I would expect.
I'd have to make these decisions and changes, but I have to. And although I think it's noble to say, I'll pay them before me, or I'll do this. When you're in a disaster recovery phase, that's not how it works. That's not practical. You literally can't get by. We couldn't pay our bills if we weren't carving out some of any revenue for ourselves.
I don't know if you had this experience, but with the LA fires, I had this aha moment where it pained me so much because for over a year at that point, I had thought, is this just because we're on an isolated island in a neighborhood that had 17 firemen and women fighting this? If this had happened in California, this never would have happened.
And to see it happen and happen worse, I was so shocked because this fantasy that my mind had created of if only I had chosen somewhere else with more resources available on the mainland, it would have been easier or different. But it also seeing the pain and the just tragedy reminded me that I also actually had recovered and healed more than I gave myself credit because I was jarred. I was distraught. I was disoriented, but I was also able to function, able to be in my business.
I was able to instill hope in friends and clients who lost everything and say, it is going to be really painful for at least a year. It will be great for about six weeks. It will be really tough as things set in from the three to six and nine month mark, and you cannot drive away or avoid seeing the visuals of destruction. And then now at the year and a half mark, there's gravel instead of the remnants of destruction.
And honestly, I can speak from that place of every time we drive to Lahaina twice a week for baseball, we coach T-ball and there's hope. Every week, every two days, every few days we were there, there's another layer of a house built up. There's another gravel lot that now has foundation laid, but it is a year and a half.
And that's a long time to think about when you're a business owner, when you are someone in the helping profession, when you are of service to others, that it really took seeing a mirror example to say, wow, I see the way forward. I wish I had known this and now I get to be of service. I've been on so many consultation calls being able to say, wish I would have done this, should have done that, was too proud at the time to do this. I think having been successful, I was too proud to ask for help.
We never made a GoFundMe. We never made any of these things that probably we should have, but I was just so used to having steady recurring income based on my skill set and business model. Even though at that point it had been already half not service-oriented, more product-based, I wasn't prepared for the amount of money we would be spending to help ourselves, our community, and others so abruptly.
And it's sort of like, I would tell people when they were spending money on their wedding, I'm like, it's going to feel like a lot. And then everything sort of levels out a year later. I remember telling that and talking about that with clients in therapy, like there would just be this financial stress. It's similar to that in that it will eventually level out, but a disaster just derails things for much longer. Yeah. And I did not want to work. I was traumatized. Totally traumatized.
Absolutely. I wanted to do manual labor. That's all I wanted to do. And that's what I did. I did a lot of hauling stuff and it felt so good. And I would bring my kids to the distribution centers and my little eight-year-old would be handing me these 25-pound waters, like in the fireman chain or to move things. But moving my body helped so much. And we didn't have communication for a few days after it happened.
So it's like, we didn't know if anybody knew, which was even scarier because there was no way in or out for a few days. And as you started to see the destruction, because it took us two days just to get off our street, because there were about a hundred trees that came down on our street, which only has like 30 houses, that my identity as a business owner was so divorced from my experience. I couldn't think about it. And I had the staff who's, all my administrative staff is Asheville based.
And so I had the staff who for a while I couldn't get in touch with, and then everybody deals with disaster differently. Yeah. And normally in the past, I would say I'd been like, okay, well, let's just get going. What's the next step? What do we do in this business to get it back? But I couldn't. I just- Yeah. The motivation and discipline- Is gone. Because you don't even know what day of the week it is. You don't even know what's happening.
And that's actually, I don't know if you feel this long-term now with what all of the other world events, it's hard to be in touch with it all when we're still in the middle of our disaster recovery and the trauma of that. And so my motivation went completely, I mean, it just disappeared. And then I reminded myself that having anything that activated a flow state, manual labor is a great thing, a craft or something for me and you work related was an aid and it just had to be different.
And so I really look at, they talk about before the fire and after the fire, before the disaster, after the disaster. And I look at my business as literally two different experiences and pathways because I had to do things radically different. And it's not that I'm building everything in a way that just in case it all burns down again, but I am doing it in a more disciplined way where I'm aware of what could potentially derail things and how tender I have to be with myself.
And it's made me a better teacher and coach probably because I'm really tuned into how many variables and how abruptly they could disrupt or change someone's experience in day-to-day life even. Yeah. It's interesting because when our storm happened, I thought of you immediately because you had been fairly open about your experience. And I remember when everything burned down, I was like, God, poor Julia, here's some cash on Venmo. Like I did not get it. I didn't get it at all.
I felt awful for you, but I didn't get it. Oh, no, but that helped. That made the difference. It was the asking. I don't know if you felt this. I could not ask. I could not ask. Someone said to me straight up, what's your Venmo? I didn't even think to ask why because I don't even know if I had a Venmo. I'm an older millennial. But I sent it and then she started posting it and then other people started posting it and sharing it. And then I was like, oh, this is what's happening.
I'm refunding massive amounts of money. I think we spent like $25,000 in two weeks because we didn't have slippers. We didn't have shoes. We didn't have underwear or anything. We had to buy plane tickets because we couldn't find housing. We were staying with strangers who opened their door. It was so chaotic that I was like, oh, cash direct to the people is actually super helpful. I was still too proud to do a GoFundMe. If you are surviving a disaster, please make one.
If your friends survive, do one for them. Just do one for them. All the time. Exactly. And know that you will build something. It will just be different. That's my main takeaway. You will build a different community. It will be different and there will be grief and layers in it, but you'll be able to build something. I think I had to remove the rebuilding and now I'm like, I'm revitalizing my life with these different builds in my business, in our community, in our friendship groups.
It's just like revitalizing it because unfortunately what was lost is lost. And I had to have that radical acceptance and that practice within myself. Allison, thank you for inviting me on. Yeah. I feel like we could talk about this for hours. I feel like there's so much that I didn't know, I didn't know until I went through it that could be helpful for other people. But I guess just for anybody surviving a disaster right now or who has survived one, we get it. We get it and reach out.
Allison and I get it. Message us. We're open books and the resources that we can share that we wish we would have done differently or instead are available to you. It's not too late. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Thank you so much, Julia. Make sure your email is actually HIPAA compliant with Powebox. Use code ABUNDANT to get Powebox for less than a hundred dollars your first year at paubox.com. If you're ready for a much easier practice, TherapyNotes is the way to go.
Go to therapynotes.com and use the promo code ABUNDANT for two months free. If you're listening, you probably need some support building your practice. If you're a super newbie, grab our free checklist using the link in the show notes. I'd love for you to follow, rate and review, but I really want you to share this episode with a therapist friend. Let's help all our colleagues build what they want.