Chuck and Ashley Elliott join me on this episode to guide us in how we can navigate both the big and the small changes in life. Connect with Chuck and Ashley on Facebook and Instagram. Get your copy of Used to Be ___: How to Navigate Large and Small Losses in Life and Find Your Path Forward.   Show Notes: Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Welcome, everyone. This is Dr. Sandra, and you're listening to I Choose My Best Life. Today, we're going to talk about how you navigate the large and the small losses in life and get back on track to moving forward. I have with me today Chuck and Ashley Elliott, and they are going to help us to navigate this process of when we used to be something, and now we're looking for what happens next. So, Chuck and Ashley, thank you so much for joining me. I want to start by just diving a little bit into why you think you needed to write a book on this topic. On what we used to be. Ashley Elliott: Our identity is often affected whenever we face loss. So, one of the things that I noticed whenever we went through recurrent miscarriages, it didn't just affect me in our marriage or intimacy. It affected me at work. It affected my ability to think and to listen to people. I was a university professor at the time, and I just have a harder time bearing the burdens of my students, and I would just have a little bit of a lower frustration tolerance. And so I found that I just felt like I was off my game. And then I felt this way with my kids. I'm like, I have two boys who are amazing. And I'm finding myself just feeling overwhelmed with things that I normally didn't. And so I noticed an identity shift in me and I felt. Inadequate in my body to be able to protect myself, really protect my baby. And so there's just so many things that I noticed in myself. I also noticed in counseling clients and students and people in our ministry realm that they felt similarly the different types of losses that they faced. Chuck Elliott: Yeah, because we find so much value in our identity and our titles. If I say that I'm I'm a banker, I'm a pastor, I'm a teacher, whatever that is. That's how you introduce yourself, right? You say, yeah, I'll tell you about yourself. I'll start off and tell you about what are my roles. What are the titles? How do I fill in the blank? And then whenever you lose that, you can wonder, how do I fill in the blank now? Who am I? Because you took away the thing that I used as an identifier. Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: I love that. And I love this I think because it goes so much further than typical losses that we think about. You mentioned miscarriage, death, and grief; there are so many different variations of loss that we experience. And sometimes the loss of seasons and roles and titles and identifiers as you mentioned, are not deemed to be as relevant. Because they're not a death or something that is, that's more hard-hitting than we often think. I'd like for you to dive a little bit deeper into that because I think for many of us, when we think about grief, we only think about grieving people. Why is it also important to grieve the other losses in our lives? Chuck Elliott: Yeah, absolutely. You can lose a relationship, and it impacts your life. Something we talk about in the book is we had some neighbors who lived right across the street from us, and they moved. Now, that may sound dramatic because I'm making it a big deal, but they didn't even meet and move across the country. They moved across town, but you know what? That impacts me because when they come home, I don't get to see them now. Our kids played together. I could wave when they check their mail. I could stalk them and know when Amazon or Walmart or somebody delivered something at their house, and I could ask questions and ask what was for dinner. Just all those little things that I can selfishly think impact my life. Now, that changes my routine. Am I going to grieve that the same way that I would the death of a family member? No, it's someth