A Reflection on Congruence, Belonging and What Carolyn Elliott’s Death Stirred Up
Carolyn Elliott took her own life over a week ago…. and it’s affected me wayyyyy more than I expected it to. I’ve been sitting with this for over a week now, and the only way I know how to move through it is to write it out.
HEADS UP: this longass post here is NOT a post about Carolyn or why she did what she did. This is not a critique of her work, nor a celebration of her work. (Well, there’s some of that, but it’s not about that). There are many wonderful social media\ posts, Substacks, and other threads discussing Carolyn, her work, life and death out there.
If you’re interested in reading a great reflection about Carolyn that helps make sense of her and her death, her friend and longtime collaborator, Laila Matthews, wrote this beautiful post.
This post is about what Carolyn’s suicide has stirred up in me, and maybe in you too, if you’re doing work in the coaching industry (or similar transformational work as a healer, therapist, etc).
I had to write this for myself…I’ve processed this in therapy, with friends, with industry peers, and needed to get this for myself and possibly you too if you’re feeling any way I’ve been feeling over the past week.
If you’re a coach, some of this post might resonate with you.
If you’re looking for gossip or dark details, this isn’t the post.
As I write this, I’m committed, as best I can, to naming my own projections and assumptions as I go here. At first I was very much opposed to the gobs of people projecting in the first 36 hours of the news. But I get it. It’s not easy to process when it hits so close to home… maybe projections and turning it back to ones self is all anyone has to make sense of it all.
I didn’t know Carolyn that well. I interviewed her for my 2022 Psychedelics, Sacred Medicines & Soul’s Purpose Summit. I posted our interview here upon request of others last week. We had some friends in common, some larger community in common, and our paths crossed in different ways. She was an industry peer. From what I understand, she launched her coaching career around 2013, a few years before I started in 2016. We were both part of the earlier wave of coaches (but def not the first!) before the industry blew up in 2020 and beyond. I read Existential Kink and took a couple of her programs. I had also worked with a friend who was one of Carolyn earlier protégés. We had shared clients, providing business coaching to some clients who were inside Carolyn’s programs.
After nearly 11 years as a coach myself, Carolyn was the ONLY coach whose emails I never unsubscribed from. That says a lot! She was a wonderfully entertaining writer, in addition to a endless wellspring of knowledge, humor, wisdom and edge.
Yesterday I sat down with a friend I’m co-hosting a retreat with to do some work. Before we started, she could tell something was off in my energy. I told her I’d barely been able to concentrate all week, that I couldn’t believe how much this suicide was affecting me. We share a mutual friend who was close to Carolyn, one of her longtime students, so I guess this did hit kind of close to home…. but as I said, Carolyn wasn’t a friend. And while she was a teacher to me, she also wasn’t one of my biggest teachers.
So why was this affecting me the way it did?
My friend reminded me to turn it back to myself. What in her did I see in myself? What about the various reasons and stories can I relate to in myself?
My god/ess, where do I begin….
Part of the answer, like many of the reflections have shared, is that I’ve been close to that edge myself. Many times, actually.
First thoughts started when I was a rebellious, troubled teenager who was already doing a bunch of drugs. I had one of those teenage attention-seeking attempts by drinking too much Robitussin. Then there was another while hitting “rock bottom” in college, thanks to way too much coca*ne and way too little sleep.
And another while running my first business (well, second), hardly making money. I was sleeping barely 5 hours a night, working my butt off to stay afloat, burning through savings, nothing but a ball of stress and anxiety. I had also got a six-month-long mystery illness that no one could figure out, that caused me debilitating full body rash, vertigo, and not being able to hear properly. I had hit another rock bottom…and contemplated su*cide more than once. I was alone and didn’t have anyone around me who understood what I was going through. I felt like a failure, and it seemed like the one thing I wanted to work most in the world simply wasn’t sustainable anymore. There was a death, of course. But only a metaphorical death.
I remember exactly what those places feel like, and I think that’s part of why this has stayed with me all week… not because I know all of what Carolyn was carrying, but because I know what it’s like to stand somewhere close to that edge. Why bother, what’s the point, the pain is too unbearable.
Just a few years ago, while running my business at what has been it’s peak, making an average of $400-650K each year, I had to take on managing my elderly mother’s advancing dementia and her entire life. I was living my dream at its peak and was essentially handed a second job that I didn’t want: managing her finances, managing a team of caregivers, taking care of her home and dog located 12 hours away, putting out new fire almost daily, figuring out how this was going to be sustainable, and what to do next.
There was a stretch where I got to the breakdown point and had to do something about it. I remember thinking, “so THIS is how people have psychotic breaks“. I had also been through the ringer the previous years losing a relationship ending with a big shock that involved him breaking ethical code of conduct, walking away from ten years of a community of “friends”, throw in a miscarriage, hormonal shifts, mystery illnesses, near death experiences, and wash it down with a bunch of ayahuasca, the world, once-in-a-lifetime astrological transits… I had literally reached my capacity until I broke.
I’ve never had a “break” and always wondered what they were like, and for the first time I think I was at the edge of it. I could see how someone could arrive at that point and want to end it all. Everything seemed to hit hard all at once, and there wasn’t a version of me with any capacity left.
A year and a half ago, I had to let go of (or temporarily pause) my Group Mastermind Program that I LIVED for, that I loved to run. I spend years and years building my email list and audience, becoming known for this program. It was “my baby”….and, also my biggest money maker. Nearly nine years of my entire identity, GONE in one decision.
It felt like a massive death…such grief. I didn’t know who I was without it for a while.
So when I think about Carolyn, I find myself wondering how much of her identity had fused with her success, book, programs, income, her online persona, audience, following, the pedastalizing.
There’ve been reports that she had financial trouble, the kind of thing that can genuinely break a solopreneur, or small scale entrepreneur, and newly single mom of two. Especially one whose entire Existential Kink-fueled success was built around the premise that, “having is evidence of wanting”.
I remember the first time I was told I owed around $65K in taxes at once. WTAF?! I had it, thankfully. But I remember the deflating, heartbreak of realizing how much of the “I finally made my big income goal!” money had just evaporated in a blip. (Pay your taxes no matter how bad it hurts).
That was the year I really saw the hamster wheel of always chasing the next million is often just ego wearing a very convincing disguise.
If you’ve been following me for the past 10 years, you know that I often wrote about the illusions of the coaching industry that have been sold to . The “You too can make millions!”… the, “make $50K a month in passive income!”
There’s a reason I’ve always kept the lure of the million-dollar-year goal that so many coaches chase as a “nice to have.” But is that really what’s most important?
“What’s most important?“
That question has been my compass in my business and life for the past 3-4 years now, and this whole week kept circling back to it.
There was a coach I watched rise fast before and during the pandemic years, making millions in her early 30’s and vocal about every bit of it. Friends kept telling me how incredible her programs were, so eventually I bought in myself. What I found inside wasn’t actually coaching at all… it was activation, inspiration, a lot of energy but very little depth or substance underneath it. I spent a year in that container watching how the whole thing worked, and I came away believing a good amount of it was performance. For anyone who knows about “dramatic demonstration”, you knew what she was doing. For anyone who has studied cult dynamics, you know what she was doing. But, she had a high energy and shared about her millions “without doing anything” that got people excited…. without ever really holding anyone though a tangible or deep process. I got furious watching newbie coaches taking her “coaching” as business advise when I knew there was another 90% she wasn’t teaching. She was the epitome of what leads to the coaching industry often getting a bad rap. I wasn’t the only one who saw through her schemes and illusions. A number of us in that container knew, one way or another, it would eventually catch up with her… and a few years later, it did — publicly, messily, reddit threads and all. Of course she’s still out there making money. But, the fraud did catch up somehow, regardless.
Seeing her facade and watching the uproar and backlash was another big turning point for me.
Always check your integrity. Inner and outter congruence matters.
It’s when I really understood that the more energetically attuned people become, the harder it gets to hide behind a facade of being “an influencer” or just a talker with no substance…. the charlatans, frauds and performers get seen eventually, one way or another.
I always knew it was never about fame or fortune for me. It was about making an actual difference while doing work I loved, having a schedule I controlled with free time, and being able to live from the work I was doing. Clearly I never cared about the likes and fame (still don’t even have the “followers” to show for it!)
I’m not saying any of this about Carolyn. This is a reflection of the industry.
What happens when your entire identity is your work?
That period taught me something else, about the numbers of “followers” themselves. I don’t go a day without seeing newer coaches and psychedelic experts suddenly showing up out of nowhere with 10K or more “followers”. Followers are meaningless. Real impact and a sustainable business is.
Early on, before I understood any better, I bought followers for a previous business — it wasn’t uncommon back then. I learned fast how much that actually hurts you, and once I became a coach, I never did it again. It’s part of why I don’t have 20K followers today. I have under ten. I put my energy into my email list instead, into the people who actually stuck around to read what I wrote, because somewhere along the way I understood that being popular and being effective are two different things, and only one of them tends to hold up over time.
Even looking at Carolyn’s IG following before she died, I found myself wondering how much of them were real. Of course, a lot of it WAS…she had a lots of fans. But the ratio of followers to actual engagement always struck me as a little strange, and it’s a strange enough pattern across this whole industry that I don’t think it’s really about any one person. I think it’s about the programming that we’ve all been taught counts as proof that we matter.
What I think is a larger pattern to discusess is what sits underneath most of this that we see in the coaching, wellness, fitness, therapy, psychedelics, any industry built around solopreneurs and personal brands…
So many people just want to be loved, seen, and belong.
There’s an entire ecosystem of platforms now built to make you believe that if you get enough likes, enough clicks, enough followers, it will finally prove you’re worthy of existing here on earth… that you’re loved, that you matter, that you’re seen.
At the root of it, underneath all the likes, is a very ancient, very human wound of not belonging, dressed up as the business model of an influencer.
I don’t think that wound starts with the platforms, either.
I think most of us learned somewhere very young, long before there was a phone in anyone’s hand, that love and belonging was something you had to earn … to be perfect, a good girl, impressive, beautiful, skinny, get good grades, be liked, and then you get to belong.
The apps didn’t invent that ache and yearning found in the wound of separation. They just found a way to monetize it, to turn a core wound into a number that refreshes every time you open your app.
A “like” was never going to reach the part of you that’s actually asking, am I worthy? Am I loved? Do I belong? It just quiets that question for a second, the way a snack quiets hunger without ever actually feeding you.
I think about a tree in a forest sometimes. It doesn’t earn its place among the others by growing the tallest or being noticed from the furthest away. It belongs simply because it’s rooted, because it’s part of the same soil and the same rain as everything else growing there.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of us got convinced belonging worked differently for people… that we had to perform our way into it, prove ourselves worthy of ground we were already standing on. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think Carolyn thought it was true either, not in her wisest moments. But knowing something and actually living rooted in it, all the way down, are two very different things.
The more connected I’ve become to the earth, to spirit, to my own actual self and the people physically around me, the less any of that pulls at me. I still want to make money. I’m still here to be paid for what I do. But I’ve watched enough people get swallowed by the illusion to know that chasing the following or even illusive income goal will never actually fill the hole it’s being used to fill.
Looking back over ten-plus years in this industry, if there’s one thing that’s kept me standing as a coach, it’s integrity, service, and sustainability.
During the Covid years I could have charged two or three times what I did but I’ve always kept my rates fair, because I wanted to stay in real service, not just extraction. At times I posted about the big months… the $60K months, the multi-six-figure quarter, made $19,000 in a week while at Burning Man. I’ve had a handful of those, and while I’m not shy about naming them.
But I rarely boasted about these in my marketing and never made my messaging solely about all the “easy” money… EVEN as a BUSINESS COACH.
The illusion of “you too can make easy millions” was never what I was building toward myself, and was something I knew was a lie. The reason I had $250K quarters, $19K weeks when offline, etc, was because I first worked my f’g butt off at it for the previous 7 years non-stop. I invested into systems, structures, strategies, support, coaches, help…. AND, did the deeper work that might be categorized as “magick” and “manifestation”. But it wasn’t ONLY magick or only manifestation. And it sure as hell wasn’t from my follower count.
Sadly, I’ve watched a lot of people in coaching, wellness, fitness, and healing industries thick with influencers get swallowed by the illusion of believing that fame must mean fortune.
I’ve tried to stay tethered instead to my heart, soul, my true path. (Hence the names of my programs). AND what’s important outside of the money, audience, growth.
With Carolyn specifically, I started noticing a shift in her content close to what felt like 1-1.5 years ago, around the time she announced her divorce and, not long after, a new relationship that moved into her business quickly. I felt something change in her energy… and I want to be honest that this part is entirely my own read. I could be wrong. I remember thinking, half-joking, half-serious, Wow, I think she’s going a little crazy.
But, like many, I didn’t think anything was that wrong…she seemed different, but good. I mean, how could someone with her level of tools, wisdom, knowledge ever veer that far off? :/
I’d always respected her and believed in her work, despite some of the controversy over the years, including a client of mine who left one of her programs because of one of the big blowups back in 2020-2021. I generally loved what Carolyn shared and her book and her work had a profound influence on me, and so many out there.She was a breath of fresh air to an industry full of fluff. Although I’d also always knew there was more beneath Existential Kink than “own your shadow” as a complete answer.
What the past week’s outpouring of reflection has reminded me is that spiritual bypassing doesn’t only happen through love and light. Any path can become a way of disowning the parts of ourselves that actually need to be deeply seen and felt… to meet all the parts, the wounded inner child, the exiles and meet them and their missing experience with depth, care, prayer. As you may know, the path is a spiral. That one thing might appear to be gone, but it might also be hiding while gaining strength. I think that’s true of bypassing in either direction, and at some point, if it’s never actually allowed and metabolized into our wholeness, something gives.
I’ve read a lot of theories about what was underneath it all for Carolyn… finances, massive tax bills, heartbreak of the new love who lied that ended seemingly quick, childhood traumas, her self reported lies to herself, lies in her work, divorce, raising kids, hormones, past Orgasmic Meditation trauma, a rumor that she was on medication, her house wasn’t selling, the emails lost due to tech snafu, a lawsuit, cancelling, people giving feedback, writing about her, letting go of longtime collaborators, and the pressure of being a public persona in a fragile, divisive world.
I won’t pretend to know which of those mattered, or how much, or whether it was some combination none of us could see from the outside. What strikes me more is this: even in total financial ruin, there’s usually a way out, and usually people willing to help you find it, if you let them. From what I understand, she did have support around her. Something in her may have simply not been able to receive it. That’s the part I keep circling.
From what I recall, she’d also launched a program not long before her death about truth-telling — about no longer lying to yourself. And from what others have shared, and what she had written in that one email, to having “lied” all along. That morning I read that email, it wrenched something in my chest, because I felt a different part of her come through. It was raw, it had shame, and my god I wonder if it was just impossible to go in deeper into the initiation she was in, deeply feel it all, and let herself die and rebirth as someone with something even better..
What does true integrity look like when no one is watching?
I’ve used the word congruence with clients more times than I can count these past few months. It’s become something like my own private measuring stick: are you congruent with what you say you value, or is there a gap opening up between your ego’s want and your soul’s actual will?
I don’t think the energy we’re living in right now has much patience left for businesses run purely by ego… the desire for fame, for followers, for being seen as having made it. When you’re coming from a real place of service, the business tends to keep supporting you, even through the lean seasons. But when there’s a widening gap between what you’re building and what you actually believe, I think that’s when things start to crack, quietly at first, and then not so quietly. Not saying
When I interviewed Carolyn, I remember being surprised. Someone so clearly brilliant, so well-studied and prolific on the page, came across on camera as almost shy. Childlike, even. There was a strange, off quality in that interview that I never quite placed at the time. I ended up posting that interview to YouTube last week, at a few people’s request, if you want to see what I mean. Maybe she was just better in writing than on camera, the way some people are. Maybe it was a weird day. Maybe something else. I don’t know. I’m naming it because it stayed with me, not because I think it explains anything.
There’s a particular kind of loneliness in this work that I don’t think we talk about enough. When you spend your days holding space for other people’s breakdowns, fears, their becoming, you get very good at being the steady one. You get good at showing up composed and resourced, because that’s what the room needs from you in that hour. But underneath that role, you’re still a freakin’ human be-ing with your own breakdowns, fears, hard week, hard year, a body, family, friends, and so on. Carolyn held space for thousands of people, many looked up to her as this very special, powerful, magick witch that seemed to have it all. I don’t know what it looked like for her behind the version the world saw, and I’m not going to pretend I do. But I know what it’s like to be the one everyone assumes is “fine”, simply because holding space is what you’re known for.
I think there’s a particular trap built into being any kind of coach, therapist, spiritual teacher or guide, one that doesn’t show up the same way in most other roles. The moment people put you on a pedestal, you inherit an expectation to have already arrived somewhere they haven’t. Many people believe that no one will buy your program if you say, Hey, I’m still figuring this shit out too, most days….
So the version of you that gets to be public is the integrated one, the wise one, the one who’s already turned her pain into a teaching. And the version of you still moving through postpartum depression, or a divorce, or a dying parent, or grief you haven’t finished feeling, hormone shifts, burnout, etc, quietly goes underground. I think that gap, the distance between the self that’s allowed to be seen and the self that’s actually living, is one of the more dangerous structural features of the whole transformational field. It’s also its own illusion, maybe the most convincing one, because from the outside it doesn’t look like a mask. It looks like arrival. And when the gap gets wide enough, that’s not a personal failing on the part of whoever’s carrying it. It’s built into the role itself.
I think the real reason this has stayed with me all week isn’t fully about Carolyn at all. It’s about a set of questions I think a lot of us coaches, healers, therapists, guides, anyone doing work that asks people to trust you with their inner life — are asking ourselves right now, whether or not we’re saying it out loud.
What happens when your business shifts, or the old ways aren’t aligned anymore? (Identity can crumble).
What happens when your identity crumbles?
What happens when your marriage ends? When you’re caring for dying parents while trying to keep your business running? When you’ve got post postpartum depression, or your hormones shift, or you’re raising kids as a single entrepreneur mom while serving hundreds or thousands of people?
What happens when the mask you built to survive in public no longer fits your authentic self underneath it?
Who’s holding the ones who hold everyone else?
The morning Carolyn’s death was announced, I happened to be on a call with my herbalist and friend. He mentioned that something like 75% of women in midlife end up on some kind of mood-stabilizing medication just to keep functioning under the weight of changes and making it through modern life. Hearing that landed heavy in me — how much pressure so many are carrying, and how easily that kind of pressure, unspoken and unsupported, can push a person somewhere dark.
I literally said to him, “I can understand why someone would want to k!ll themselves”…. an hour later, I got the news.
What actually sustains a human being?
Not what makes someone successful. Not what makes someone influential. Not what earns the most likes, or builds the seven-figure business. What actually holds a person up through heartbreak, financial free-fall, aging parents, shifting hormones, midlife, becoming a different person than the one who started the business in the first place?
For me, more and more, the answer keeps coming back to community over followers. A few years ago I made a decision: community is more important than internet fame or even making money. I still stand by it today.
There was a period where I realized how isolated running my business had made me, how easy it is, when your days are built around content and clients and courses, and doing it 99.9% of it online, to mistake likes and clicks for real connection. I LOVE my clients and doing what I do, but the rest I’d be fine without. Likes are meaningless. Are my Instagram followers the “community” I want around me in the New Earth? Yes, I’d love them all to be my neighbors, but they’re not. Heck, if I’m lucky the algorithms remind some of them who I am once a year. I still ask myself this often — if the “zombie apocalypse” happened, is this who community really is?
I think that’s also why I stay wary of how much of this industry is leaning into AI to produce its content, its coaching, its connection. If you’re outsourcing all of it, there’s very little of your actual heart left in what you’re putting out. I think we’re going to keep seeing people lose something real by handing their center over to a technology that promises connection but mostly just pulls people further from their own.
What does it mean to stay connected to your soul in an increasingly artificial world?
I’ve had visions, on and off for over 13 years now, of the world changing in ways that felt both frightening and, somehow, necessary. An old earth crashing under the weight of financial collapse, maybe a full reset, and a new earth slowly being tended by people who actually care about each other, rising up alongside it. There’s real beauty in that when I let myself see it clearly. But there’s fear underneath it too — none of us actually knows what a major financial reset looks like from the inside, or what it means to live in a world where AI has taken over so much of daily life that people start losing track of what’s even real.
What happens as more of us keep outsourcing ourselves to bots and algorithms, losing the thread back to our own hearts, to Gaia, to spirit? I’ve seen some version of this vision more than once over the years — more people losing their footing, struggling to navigate whatever this new world turns out to be, and, I’m afraid, more people taking their own lives along with it. I don’t say that to be doom and gloom, and I pray every day that none of it is true. I’ve carried this particular vision for over a decade, and I know I’m not the only one who’s seen something like it. I don’t know if Carolyn’s death is the beginning of something or one devastating, isolated point on a graph none of us can see the shape of yet. But some part of me believes it might be a kind of collective lesson — a nudge toward asking, individually and as an industry: where am I lying to myself? Where am I performing instead of living? What’s most important, right now, actually?
I don’t need to be the next famous, multimillionaire coach. I wouldn’t say no to more money, none of us would.
But I think the deeper invitation, for me and maybe for you too, is learning to live inside a sustainable version of success that leaves room for a full, human life. One with space to sit down and share a meal with people who’d show up for you no matter what. One with room to fall apart sometimes without your whole identity collapsing along with it.
Zoom out far enough and this stops being a story about one industry, or one death, and turns into a much bigger question: what happens to any of us when the life we built stops matching who we’ve become? How do you stay steady as an entrepreneur through the ordinary chaos of a life — love that ends, children who need you differently than they used to, family members dying, a body that changes — inside a system that was never really built to hold any of that?
We don’t have a culture that meets women moving through major life shifts, or mothers who suddenly find themselves parenting alone, or business owners living through a real downturn, with anything like the softness those seasons actually require. I don’t think that’s only a coaching-industry problem. I think it’s a much bigger one. This industry is just where I happen to stand close enough to watch it play out.
I don’t have a tidy ending for this, and I don’t think I’m supposed to. I didn’t know Carolyn well enough to eulogize her properly, and this was never meant to be that. It’s meant to be an honest reflection — mine, and maybe in some ways, yours too — on what her death is stirring up in an industry that doesn’t always make room for people to fall apart in public and still be held.
There have been moments in my own life when I understood how a person could reach a place where they felt there was no way out. I don’t celebrate that, and I don’t pretend to understand what Carolyn was carrying. But I have enough of my own history with that kind of darkness to know how distorting unbearable pain can be, and how convincingly it can tell you there’s no other door in the room.
If any part of this is landing somewhere tender in you, if you’re the one standing near that edge right now, please don’t sit with it alone. In the US, you can call or text 988 any time, day or night, to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Please reach out to someone. You belong as you are. You matter as you are, and you are not alone in this.
If you have your own reflections on any of this above, fee free to reach out. You’re always welcome to email me through my contact page.