From Surviving Murder to Building A Coaching Business (Arci Grey Interview)

In this video, I interview Arci Gray. RC survived attempted murder, and now she helps other trauma survivors as a coach to achieve their goals. When I heard Arcee's story, I knew that I wanted to share it because I just think it's such a beautiful example of using your experience, your life experience to go support other people. In this interview, we dive into what happened to her, what helped her heal, including the role of therapy versus coaching, and the number one mistake she sees survivors make when they go to start a business. So this is a little bit different from my usual content, and there is some sensitive topics covered in this interview, but I really wanted to share it because I think it's important to talk about for folks who are struggling with trauma. Hope you enjoy.

Essentially, two days before my 37th birthday, I was kidnapped. I was held captive for four days. I was tortured, beaten, raped multiple times. And ultimately, I survived murder when my knife. When a knife was put to my throat and throat was slit with a knife. I guess the key takeaway that I would. I would take from that is, like, my story is super impactful. Like, people often have a lot of questions. They want to come and talk to me. They want to know all the details. But what's super, super important is that it's not just a. An inspiring story is like, there are so many things that I learned about myself, my life, business, from having that experience.

How long ago was that?

Is it five years? 20? No, six years ago now? Okay, that was in 2018. Yep.

For you, how did that experience of, like, almost dying, essentially?

Yeah.

How did that. How did that show up as you were working in your own business, in your work, in your life afterwards?

At that time when it all happened, I was running two businesses. I was doing.

Oh, you were already running.

I was already running. I was already in business. I was. I was running an architecture and real estate development company. And then I was also a realtor. And that was very pertinent to how everything happened. But when I experienced this, I lost my business. I mean, my business completely shut down. I lost clients. My business partner couldn't keep up with both ends of, you know, the business. I was physically incapacitated. I was emotionally incapacitated. Um, I mean, I put my pants on backwards one day. One day I went to two doctor's appointments and two different lawyer appointments. And no one told me, like. Which means not only. And trust me, it's not that they didn't notice. I promise. It's not because they didn't notice. It's because the Way people looked at me changed. While genuinely people do want to help, most people have no idea how to help you, including doctors, including lawyers. So my ability to run a business or just keep up, even though the drive was there to be like, oh, I gotta keep going. I can't lose these clients. I have to keep doing this. I was just digging a hole deeper and deeper for myself. So that business shut down and I spent the next, the greater part of the next year between doctor's appointments, physical therapy. Had to learn to walk properly again. I mean, I don't know, I can kind of go down the list of the five things that I learned. It's kind of a, this sort of mantra that I tell myself fairly often. So the first one is, you're not done yet. One thing I learned by, like physically in, during the traumatic event, I guess while I was being held captive, is that I'm a lot stronger than I think I am. And having that awareness of that in myself, I'm much, it's much easier to see it in, in other people. Or maybe it's easier to see it in myself now that I can see it in other people. But I learned probably, I mean, long before this event, you know, I read a David Goggins book and he talks about, you know, when you think you're done, you're only at, you know, 30 or 40% or whatever of, you know, your capacity. And if you can just push through that, that wall of, you know, I think I'm done, I think I'm done. And that's 100% true. Physically, it's a hundred percent true. When I was being beaten for hours on end, I had this moment of like, okay, can I just take one more hit? Like, I don't have to think about if I'm going to survive this. I didn't even know what this was. I didn't know that it was going to be four days of hell. I just was so hyper focused and part of that survival, brain taking over, but it was just focused in the moment. Can I take just one more hit? And as long as I told myself, yes, I can, then I had the sort of mental stamina to keep going and not completely lose it. And I found that is a thousand percent true in life, but very specifically in business, like, if you can just take one more. No, one more hit. If you can. If you can take just one more, then you can keep going. It doesn't mean that every single thing, you know, every moment, every experience is going to be another hit. But if you can take just one more hit, you can keep going. You're a heck of a lot stronger than you think you are. The second thing that I would say that I learned is that I learned to call my own bullshit. I really truly believe that. Up until that experience I had major execution problems. I'd have ideas for days, I'd have strategy for days. I didn't really effectively know how to execute things either. Fear of failure, maybe laziness, maybe just imposter syndrome. But I definitely would come up with all these amazing ideas and I would just get to this place where I wouldn't fully execute them. I would start, I'd get this huge momentum burst and I'd throw. Pour tons of hours into a project and then I would abandon it because probably something tiny, right? And I think a lot of people experience this as well. They have those little fears inside their head that, that say, oh, this is a little scary, nevermind, I don't need to do that. It's not. I don't really want that thing, right? We talk ourselves out of our own goals. Number three was I needed to learn to take responsibility for my own healing. And this kind of ties into that self love component. I learned, believe it or not, at that same conference that, that I was talking about that someone used this sort of anecdotal. I don't even remember who it is. I don't remember who it was. I wish I could credit them for this to. I'd love to give credit where credit is due, but essentially what I walked away with from that is that responsibility is a line. There's a line. And anything above the line is taking responsibility. And anything that falls below this line is not taking responsibility. And very specifically, there are three things that fall below the line. Blame, shame, and justification. Having this awareness that while everything that I experienced was not my fault, it was still my responsibility to heal. Number four was raise your standards. The value you place on yourself is not, it's not equal to your worth. When I went through this whole thing and after the fact, there was this entire legal process that went along with it. Ultimately the person who did this meet did not go to jail. And that is one of the first questions people ask me is like, is he in jail? No, he's not. The justice system does not work the way we think it does. One of the things that was happening is I was having conversations with the district attorney because there were a lot of moments of they were going to drop charges and then they brought new charges and they were going to Drop charges. And that was an emotional roller coaster. And at one point I was offered a monetary settlement in a private civil suit. I had a conversation with the da and the DA was aware of this offer. She was made aware of the offer. And her concern was that financial compensation was going to sway my willingness to testify. The monetary amount that was offered was. I don't even know how to describe it. It was insulting. It was an insult. When you would look at what I went through, it's really difficult to put a number, a monetary number on someone's grief and pain and physical damage. It's not just, oh, well, I lost out on, you know, a lifetime earnings of such and such career. Right. That's not, you know.

Right.

Like that's sort of how they do, like workers comp. Type things and stuff like that, you know, how do you quantify someone's emotional damage into a, into a monetary amount? You don't. And it's just what's the person willing to accept is sometimes what it comes down to. And my conversation with the DA was basically that the amount that was offered and I'm bound legally to not talk about it, and by the way, I did not accept it, was very petty in comparison. It was, what am I allowed to say? 7 figures. It was part of the original offer. There was a down payment of several six figures. And then ultimately there was an offer of seven. And I declined both of them. But the DA was concerned about me being bought, I guess, not to testify. And my response to her was basically that that monetary amount was not an indication of my worth, but an indication of his limitation and ability to pay. There was no amount of money that was going to change my values. And what was important to me, number five, is you can't unlive it, but you don't have to keep reliving it. It is not your fault, but it's your responsibility. Along that same vein, you can't go back in time. We can't undo. We don't have to sit and commiserate with other people and wish that we could go back in time. But you, you, you don't have to keep reliving the same thing over and over. You actually can pivot. You actually can have just something you can have do and be more right like you can. You don't have to be defined by this.

How should they think about how to best engage with people?

You know, years ago I did a podcast episode on this, on my old podcast that is no longer active. But it was basically the 10 things you should never say to a survivor, yeah, yeah, yeah. And one of them is, I'm sor. It's a natural human instinct to say, like, I'm so sorry you went through that. Like, you know, when someone passes away in your family, I'm sorry about that. And, you know, it's a social construct to do this. Like, we, we have this sort of social contract where we, you know, we want. That's the right thing to say. Right, Is to offer sympathy to someone when they're experiencing that. But when you're saying I'm sorry, deep down, what you're saying is, I feel sorry for you. Like, I have sorrow for you. And while that is true, you may feel bad for them, that's not necessarily empowering. It's not that you can't just say I'm sorry. It's that you can say, I'm so sorry that you're going through that. You can't leave them hanging with that because it makes it look like you feel bad for them that they have fallen, that they are down low and somehow they are a lesser person that. That can cut deep. And we don't even realize it. You know, if someone comes to you to tell you their story, they trust you, they respect you, and they need you. We don't just go tell our story to anybody. If, especially when it's fresh and new, especially with sexual trauma, that is something that people have a very difficult. It's very intrusive, and it's very hard to share those stories. So if someone is coming to you and sharing their story, it's because they trust you and they do need you, they respect you. And the. A few things not to say is one, the I'm gonna go kick his ass. We don't need anger. We've got plenty of that of our own. Like, we don't need to know that somebody else is anger and angry and they're gonna go be a vigilante. Like, that's not helping us either. That's putting the attention on the wrong person. Right? And there's a lot of wrong ways to do it. And, and there's a lot of right ways to do it. But essentially, if you can just get it in your mindset to say to them, like, hey, I understand you're going through a lot. You might not know what you need, but I want you to know that I've got you. So any. You know what I mean? And just continually reassuring, they're going to say, some, some people are going to say, no, I'm Fine. I don't need anything. Yes, they do. They just don't know yet. Or they're afraid to ask because asking is very vulnerable and they're already in a really vulnerable situation. Right. Um. Even if you don't get what they're going through, you things along the lines of like, I get you and I've got you. And even if you don't get it, go educate yourself, get it, try to understand it. Say to them, I don't know what you're going through because I've never been there, but I've got you. No matter what. People really do need to know that they've got somebody who's got their back. And not in this rageful, like I said, vigilante kind of way. It doesn't, it doesn't actually help. For a moment. There's this relief of like, oh, somebody's got my back. But then, but then you have this idea of like, oh, well, they're leaving me to go deal with that. And it's. Then you're still left alone. You need community. You definitely need community. The, the instinct is to isolate yourself. But even if you just let one person in, so if you're able to support them, it's creating a sense of consistency around them. Safety and security. And safety is physical safety. Right. Like, make sure there's comfort. And consistency is a huge part of that. When you say, I'll be there at 4 o', clock, be there at 4 o'. Clock. If you say you're gonna call, call. Trust has been broken in this person. And that's not just an emotional thing. It's not, well, this other person broke your trust. Why are you taking it out on me? It is instinctual. This is on the neurological level.

It's not specific to that one person that broke their trust. It becomes, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so that was so helpful to kind of understand, like, the, the do's and the don'ts. Makes a lot of sense. How should people think about therapy and coaching in this context? I guess I'm curious if you could go back to a former version of yourself, like, what's the type of support you try to source? And when a lot of my clients.

Come to me and they're like, well, therapy didn't work and meds didn't work and all these things didn't work, and they're like, I'll try anything, right? So I kind of. A lot of the work I do picks up where therapy leaves off or where therapy drops you off. Sometimes I get into I've had a few social media arguments with discussions with some therapists who really like hunker down and really stand behind this idea that it works if you do the work. And people come to me because they can't do the work. So it's not for a lack of trying. It's not that they're lazy, it's not that they aren't taking responsibility. It's that a lot of the work in therapy is really difficult for someone who's actually stuck in survival mode. I have three rules that I use with all of my clients is the basis of the work that I do. And it's rule number one is no dying. Your brain above all else is going to do the things that keep you alive. It's going to make choices for you. No matter what you want. It's going to do the thing that it knows is going to keep you safe and alive. Rule number two is no crying. It doesn't mean that you can't cry in life. What it actually means is after your brain is done with survival mode, after it has kept you safe and alive, then it can worry about your thoughts and feelings. And the rule number three is no dying again. Because if you're not growing, you're dying. And that's about goals and forward momentum and all of that. But unfortunately, therapy so much focuses on our thoughts and our feelings. And cognitive behavioral therapy is one of the most common therapies used to treat trauma. And it fails over 70% of the time. That is not my statistic. That comes from Bessel Vander Koch, who is a therapist and has done so much research, he's written a few books about this as well. But cognitive behavioral therapy fails for 70% of traumatized adults. Any other drug, any other treatment, a surgery, a drug, a treatment, any other medical intervention that failed at that rate would be immediately pulled off the market or banned. But when it comes to therapy, this is something that is still widely used to treat trauma and, and it can cause more harm than good in people because people who are still, whose nervous system is still stuck in survival mode, thoughts and feelings are not even on the radar. That's how we experience the world. That's how we think it is the problem. Like we think our thoughts are the problem. We think the intrusive thoughts and the catastrophizing thoughts of the problem. We think that our self deprecation is the problem. We think our mental health is our problem. It's actually your neurological state that's causing the problem. So when people go to therapy and feel like, I'm trying, but I leave therapy feeling worse, feeling what's called dysregulated. When they leave that and they feel like, okay, I just have the wrong therapist, then they try another therapist. Most people, most trauma survivors, go to therapy for about seven years. It costs them somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand dollars out of pocket. And so many people will leave either feeling like it did not help at all, like they're still in the exact. They're still having the same symptoms, still experiencing the same things, or they have left with coping mechanisms that limit their ability to perform how they want to in life. They've accepted that they are a smaller version of themselves, that there are just things they can no longer do because they have this thing, this burden that they have to carry around with them. That's the basis for everything that I do, is we focus on what your nervous system is doing first and we address it at the root cause. So what I tell people, the sort of metaphor I use is that when you go to therapy and you learn coping mechanisms, if you're finding that they are not working or they're working in the short term to give you immediate relief to a symptom, but they haven't solved the greater problem, then you're basically taking the batteries out of the smoke detector while your kitchen's on fire because you don't like the noise the smoke detector is making, right? So when people attack rule number two first, which is trying to gain regain control of their thoughts and their feelings and ignore the kitchen on fire, or ignore rule number one, what's going on in their nervous system, this creates this cycle, and we end up in a crisis cycle. We live our lives one crisis to the next. And the way I would define it for someone, for them to make the decision of whether they need a coach or therapist, and I absolutely recommend both. I would never tell anyone not to go to therapy, especially if they feel like it's working. There's a lot that you need to do in terms of finding the right therapist and the right types of therapy and all of that. That's a discussion for another day. But for most people, what I tell them or advise them from my point of view and my perspective and what I experienced was if you. What you're experiencing is a circumstance, like someone's passed away, for example, you can't undo that, right? You can't go back in time. You can't bring someone back from the dead. You. If what you're experiencing is a circumstance, then go to therapy. Therapy is designed to help you feel better about what you're experiencing. Okay. If what you're experiencing is a problem, find a coach. And find a coach who's done the thing you want to do and aligns with how you want to solve that problem.

For people who are kind of in your sweet spot now, people who have experienced a significant amount of trauma, but they're entrepreneurs or, and they're entrepreneurs, they want to start or grow a business. Who, what's the biggest mistake that that person would make?

People come to me saying like, well, I can't work, I can't go to a job because I have social anxiety. I have these symptoms. I don't know what days I can work and what days I can't work. I don't have control of my symptoms. And I think people make a really common mistake of two actually mistakes. One, they come to me saying, I need to start this business because I have to make money and I can't work a regular job. That's a pain based goal in that I'm going to start this business and it's magically going to fix all of my problems. It's going to get me out of pain. Financial pain when you are struggling with trauma is massive. It's huge. It is. One of the most common psychographics of trauma survivors is financial insecurity. So this drive to start our own businesses and build a business is really, it's, it's about having control, it's about having a sense of security. And if anybody, any entrepreneurs out there know when you're an entrepreneur, there really isn't a massive sense of security in running your own business.

I wouldn't be like, if I need extra security, what am I going to do? Oh, start a business.

Oh, I'm going to start a business. Said no one ever. No successful entrepreneur ever. There's a lot of risk involved, right. And, and you have to have a certain amount of risk tolerance in order to become an entrepreneur. But I also think a lot of entrepreneurs are driven because they need a sense of in their life. So having that distinction. And I think so I think when people come with that perspective, it can't just be to get out of pain. You can't just start this business to get out of pain. You have to have a clear direction. And this brings me right back to, you know, rule number one is no dying. Okay, cool. If you are financially struggling and it's, and it's causing you imminent death, cool. We obviously we need to solve that, but you can't just be chasing it for the money. You have to have an outcome in mind. You have to have growth. You have to. And the most successful entrepreneurs will have something that gives back to the world. It is not just growth of, oh, I want to make a million dollars in my business. You could be driven. That may actually work. But I promise you, you're going to get there and feel completely unfulfilled. What are you giving back? Go give it is kind of what I say. So I would think that. That trauma survivors, you know, have a couple of little pitfalls, but that's definitely one of the biggest ones, is don't just go into it thinking it's going to solve your problems. You're going to grow massively. It's going to solve a lot of problems for you. A lot of the symptoms and frustrations and struggles, but have a clear direction and know exactly where you're going. And if you don't, like, that's okay to not know yet. Like, we can get you there. Like, that's there, you know, like, that's what I'm. The huge part of what we do is trying to figure out who you are without trauma, who you are minus trauma. And once you know that, like, the floodgates open. Love it.

That's perfect. I think we should wrap there. Thank you so much for, for sharing and. And for the advice. I think people are going to get a lot out of this.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for the opportunity to kind of share just my story and what I'm doing, and I hope we get to do it again.