The Story of the Woman Who Wasn’t Supposed to Rise. By Coach Elle Jolie

There are women who survive things quietly and there are women who survive things loudly and then there are women like me who survive things the world doesn’t even have language for. You can look at me now and see the muscle, the warmth, the discipline, the softness that wasn’t destroyed, the strength that wasn’t taken, the calm that looks like it was always there. But none of that shows you what it took to get here. None of it reveals the injury, the betrayal, the rupture, the courtroom cruelty or the countless ways I could have disappeared. My story didn’t start in the gym. It started in the moments I shouldn’t have survived.

When I say I lived through a Grade 5 splenic rupture, most people don’t understand the severity of those words. Grade 5 is the kind of injury that ends lives. It means a shattered organ, massive internal bleeding, blood pressure dropping into the earth, a body in freefall. Women in midlife rarely make it out of that operating room with their spleens and many don’t make it out at all. But I did. I survived with nothing but an embolization and a physiology that refused to die. No surgery. No scalpel. No open abdomen. Just my body holding on because somewhere deep inside I think it already knew I was meant to rise again. My spleen lived. My fascia stayed intact. My nervous system never fully disconnected. And that alone makes me a medical anomaly.

But the rupture wasn’t the only blow. My spine was injured. Whiplash rattled my brain. My world blurred into fragments. And while my body was trying to keep me alive, the rest of my life was being torn apart in ways that medicine can’t measure and textbooks don’t teach. Coercive control entered my life through the court system dressed in legal language and false authority. A biased arbitrator and an ex-partner used the system like a weapon. I lost spousal support. I lost financial stability. I lost one of my children. I lost safety. I lost trust. I lost parts of my life I had spent decades building. And all of it happened while I was still healing, still bleeding, still trying to piece my spine and my brain and my identity back together.

Yet every morning, I got up and made breakfast for my kids. I kept the home beautiful. I cooked meals with the same love I’d always had. I tried to stay gentle in a world that wasn’t gentle with me. I sometimes screamed. I did collapse. But, I didn’t disappear inside bitterness or hate. I stayed a mother. I stayed a woman. I stayed myself, even while the rest of the world tried to make me someone smaller.

During this chaos, I launched Elle Jolie Wellness. Not because I was ready but because I had to. I needed purpose. I needed income. I needed to rebuild from ashes that weren’t even cold yet. My first clients arrived carrying their own storms, some more unwell and unkind than I could have predicted. They knew that I was coaching them while carrying trauma in my bones and court documents in my bag and internal scars across my abdomen. But I showed up anyway. I gave them the best I had even when the best I had was held together by borrowed sleep and stubborn hope.

And then, for a moment, I couldn’t carry it all. The pain caught up. The fear caught up. The exhaustion caught up. I hit the psychological wall that no motivational quote prepares you for. I needed help, and I asked for it. I chose psychiatric support not because I was weak but because I finally understood that strength isn’t the refusal to break. It’s the willingness to rebuild properly.

What still surprises people is that through all of this—through trauma, menopause, legal abuse, financial devastation, emotional heartbreak, concussion fog, vertebral pain, and the constant pressure of rebuilding my entire life—I became physically stronger than I had ever been before. My abs are more defined now than they were in my thirties. My muscle is denser, my core is deeper, my form is sharper. Estradiol and progesterone helped my body recover what nature tried to take. My training became smarter. My sleep improved. My stress lowered. My heart opened again. And my body responded by becoming something it had never been before. Not just strong but unshakably strong. Not just lean but resilient. Not just fit but rebuilt.

I also refused to step into corporate gyms that take half of a trainer’s income while offering none of the integrity. I refused to play the game of predatory wellness. I walked away from resorts that pushed unsafe treatments and unqualified advice. I reported unethical programs. I chose honesty over comfort. Accountability over silence. Ethics over popularity. Advocacy over compliance. And that choice cost me. But it also freed me.

Every day, I fight for what is right. I fight for my children. I fight for my business. I fight for women who come to me believing they are too old, too broken, too tired or too late. I fight for safety in an industry that often harms the very people it claims to help. I fight for myself because I learned the hard way that no one else will do it for me.

This is the part where people ask how I do it. How I still date. How I keep loving. How I remain hopeful. How I stay soft. How I don’t let bitterness swallow my heart whole. The truth is that I survived so much darkness that I now protect my light with everything I have. I know what it feels like to lose everything, so I savor anything. Hope. Laughter. A kiss. A chance. A second chance. A moment of quiet. A lift that feels right. A woman finding herself again in my coaching sessions. Life is raw but it’s mine and I’m not done with it.

I am not the woman I was supposed to become according to statistics, medicine or the court system. I am the woman I fought to become. I am the woman who rose from every blow. I am the woman who rebuilt her body after it almost failed, rebuilt her life after it was stolen and rebuilt her heart after it was shattered. And this is why StrongHER exists. Because if I can rise from all of this—menopause, trauma, injury, heartbreak, legal violence, financial ruin, concussion, vertebrae damage—and build a body and a life that feels powerful and peaceful and mine, then other women can rise too.

I didn’t just survive.
I transcended.
And this is my StrongHER.

Love, Coach Elle