We were lucky to catch up with J. Lacey Taylor recently and have shared our conversation below.
Lacey, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
In comparison to the children I grew up around, the odds were always stacked against me from a young age. As a child of divorce at the age of two, I looked around my world and saw intact families that had a lot more going for them. The burden alone, on my mom, and my desire to take that burden off of her was enough to completely change the person I would become. While my dad lavished me with gifts. She would raise me without child support from my father, so it burdened her with the everyday expenses and all of the physical and emotional burdens of being the solo caregiver. If she could do it all, I could do it all.
So I always had the sense to not put my troubles on my mom. We would move often and I would hate to leave behind friends, but I couldn’t look back, I had to look forward. One move would shock me to my core. It was an exciting time for me when I was entering Middle School and getting settled in, when my mom would pick me up in the middle of my school day and say, “Say goodbye to your school. You are never going back. We are heading to a shelter.” I had to look out the back window and report any sightings of my step-dad as we tried to lose him to get to the protected shelter for battered women and their children.
Through parent divorces, use of drugs and alcohol in the home, physical fights, being uprooted with moves, etc. and not being able to use those emotional triggers to burden my mom I learned to move through it all. When helping my aunt move through something hard, I remember telling her my secret visual I had for myself. My superpower was that I could be at the center of a hurricane with crazy winds and things flying all around me but nothing could harm me. I remember the look on her face and I was just as amused and amazed at the visual as well. That is the type of resilience that is built by using all the bad things that happen in life and turning them into something positive…a superpower of resilience you’ve earned, that no one can take away from you.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
What began as a love for art but a need for a career, I attended the University of North Florida and earned my degree in graphic design. My internship was with the Mayo Clinic training with their webmaster to learn coding (because there were no website classes at that time). I combined graphic design with coding and was a pioneer website designer giving Fortune 500 companies their first professional websites. That would grow into a love for SEO as well, because I didn’t want to just provide a website but also a way for those websites to get found. After 20+ years of experience, I opened J. Lacey Taylor to offer my experience to businesses that could use my help. It has always been my goal to have my own business. After a year, I looked back on my year and made some realizations about the clients I wanted to serve and my “why.” My conclusion was, “life gets in the way,” and this is especially true for women. Here I was, a woman working on my dreams, with what seemed like a million roles to fill, and I was dealing with major losses as well as my own health disorder. I had also noticed my female clients didn’t waste any of my time. They understood the value of time and got straight to business. My niche was clear, I would serve women business owners. I created two signature offers; one for the new business owner that needed all the visual elements to start a business and one for women that simply want to level-up and GROW their business (hence the big leaf in my logo). My last painting series also includes big tropical leaves, a nod to a love of the nature that surrounded and soothed me in my childhood.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
The three qualities/skills/areas of knowledge that were most impactful in my journey were #1 a deep understanding that what is right for my community isn’t necessarily right for me. From an early age, I knew I didn’t think like a majority of the culture I lived in. And the things I was thinking in comparison to what was being expressed in my hometown had a sharp contrast. I set a course to be unique and stand against ugly group think. In groups it meant I might not be popular, but one-on-one I might open minds and give hope for a better world. #2 developing my voice became important but at first I thought my voice had to be massive. I learned the hard way that getting everyone to focus on a problem can actually make the problem worse. Not everyone has that same love light within. It’s in the quiet moments, one-on-one, where change can occur and spread. Like responding to your questions…making sure I take the time to be thoughtful…making sure I tell the story right so that I get the point across…and intimately connecting with the person that will read this in the future. Due to a fight or flight nervous system built during my childhood, I noticed my on-the-spot responses were never what I wanted to say. I was a deer in headlights. My brain would freeze and what came out never articulated the beauty within. So now, I know it’s important not to give a quick answer, but to take a deep breath and slow things down so that my thoughtfulness is expressed. #3 Having the skill to see the big picture regularly, stepping out of ego regularly to do what my family, my community and the world needs with humility and simply remember (especially during dark times) that I want to spread love.
Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?
Can I step back into ego here? Because I would like to give credit to myself. “I’d like to thank me!” (Insert gif of Snoop Dog’s acceptance speech here.) WE are responsible for our lives. No one is coming to rescue us. While I have great relationships with my husband, family and friends – they didn’t know what I needed. I was struggling for years with my health disorder but no one could save me. I did try everything I could, I researched everything I could, I went to all the doctors and even they couldn’t cure me (because that’s not how our healthcare system works. They only mask symptoms with pharmaceuticals.) I had to be my own advocate. I had to go through my own journey.
It started at the age of 12. I wouldn’t be diagnosed with PMDD (Premenstral Disphoric Disorder) until I was 31. PMDD is a sensitivity to the normal hormonal fluctuations of a cycle. Trauma occurred and a belief was formed to set a neural pathway that changed the way DNA expressed itself to be sensitive to my very normal cycle. One in twenty women have it. 90% that have it will go undiagnosed. And, 30% that have it will attempt suicide. The original name of the PMDD international organization was named Gia Allemand after the Bachlorette star that had PMDD and committed suicide. IT IS THAT LIFE DISRUPTING and DEVASTATING!
“The teacher appears when the student is ready.” For me, I was hearing whispers of a cure but the brain fog, extreme fatigue and initial definition of the description of the cure frustrated me more than I was willing to hear it out. A woman, Natalie R. Hebert, had PMDD and was training in RTT when she realized her PMDD had vanished. She asked the founder of RTT, Marisa Peer, if she thought it could have cured the PMDD and the answer was, “yes.” A program was built around RTT customized for PMDD sufferers called, The Red Tent program, and it has cured or improved PMDD for thousands of women at this point. When I researched RTT initially I found a video of the founder explaining what RTT was – she used the term “mind over matter” and I was completely infuriated! “My disorder was physically in my body, I knew and used positive thinking and that was not helpful!,” or so I thought. How in the world did she think she cured PMDD with this logic? I turned away for a year or two until things had gotten so bad that I couldn’t dismiss anything. Through my paintings, I was practicing receptivity and being open spiritually to universal wisdom. I finally opened to the idea that women were saying – cured them of PMDD.
Not everyone that does RTT is cured. During the program we had Sunday calls with other women going through the program. I could see they were not getting the same results I was getting. I could see the control in them, where I had surrendered. I could see the lack of faith, where I was faithful. I could see the lack of understanding in the science, where I had understanding from reading the research. I could see a lack of commitment, where I was blocking off time to dedicate to the work.
RTT is a hybrid of three therapies; CBT cognitive behavioral therapy, NLP neurolinguistics programming and hypnosis. In a session, you are guided to three traumatic moments where beliefs were formed that worked against you (and for me created PMDD in my body.) With your brain in a susceptible brain wave frequency, you erase those events and replace them. As a new neuro pathway is formed, the trauma and ailments within the old neural pathway dissolves. After one session of RTT, I AM CURED! Where I had been skeptical of hypnosis before, I saw its value.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jlaceytaylor.com
- Instagram: @jlaceytaylor
- Facebook: @jlaceytaylor
- Other: Services I offer: Website Design, Graphic Design, SEO Artist: https://jlaceytaylor.
com/the-fine-art-painter/
More about my Freedom from PMDD journey: https://jlaceytaylor.com/the-pmdd-awareness- advocate/freedom-from-pmdd/
Image Credits
I’m not sure the photo upload worked properly. I have several I can email. They are all my photos. So image credit is J. Lacey Taylor
