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How to Rebuild Your Life After Losing Everything (Twice)

From the show · October 15, 2026 · Andrew Rocha

Melanie Mitchell-Epp was 27 and driving down the highway with no plan. She'd been married since she was 21, and she had a two-year-old son. The one thing she knew for certain was that she couldn't stay in the relationship she was in.

That drive was the start of a two-year custody battle. At the end of it, the thing she feared most happened. She lost custody of her son.

"The pain when I woke up the morning after he was gone was beyond bearable," she told me. "I didn't know how I was going to get through the next 10 minutes, but I was somehow with a court order supposed to just get on with life."

I've known Melanie and her husband, Garth Epp, for years. Garth and I worked together early in my career, and I told him on the show that I feel like I got a degree from him. Together they run Your Limits Lifted out of Red Deer, where they coach people and teams through the thinking that keeps them stuck. They sat down with me for Episode 1 of The Currency of Happiness.

What gets me about their story is that they rebuilt their lives twice. First on their own, after everything fell apart. Then together, as a blended family that looks nothing like what either of them had planned.

Melanie's two decisions

Melanie says two decisions changed everything for her.

The first came about two weeks after she left her marriage. She'd grown up believing in God, but she pictured Him as "a judge waiting to see me do something wrong so he could punish me." In that raw stretch she came to a personal faith in Jesus, and she says it gave her the hope that carried her through what came next. She doesn't think she'd have made it without it.

The second came years later. By then her life had gone from survival to struggle, and from struggle to stable. Stable isn't healed, though. She still woke up every day feeling punched in the stomach when she remembered her son wasn't there, and wasn't coming tomorrow either.

She was invited to a workshop. On the second day, the woman leading it started talking about pain, about things that had been unfair and unjust. Melanie's heart started pounding. She was sure this woman was about to tell her how wrong it was, what had happened to her.

Instead the facilitator said, "This way of thinking is called..." and began describing a victim mentality.

Melanie didn't hear the next few sentences. Her mind was stuck on the idea that there could be a way of thinking at all. "Doesn't everybody just think?"

And here's the part I keep coming back to. It gave her hope. "If my thinking is the problem, I can change my thinking." She called it the best news she'd received in a long time.

What researchers mean by a victim mindset

I want to be careful here, because Melanie didn't choose what happened to her. Losing your child in a custody battle is a real loss, and nobody on the show argued otherwise.

Psychologists have studied the pattern she was describing. In a 2020 paper in Personality and Individual Differences, Gabay and colleagues defined the tendency for interpersonal victimhood as "an enduring feeling that the self is a victim across different kinds of interpersonal relationships." Across eight studies they tied it to four patterns: a need for others to recognize your pain, a sense of moral superiority, a lack of empathy, and rumination. People higher in it read situations more negatively, remembered things more negatively, and wanted revenge more.

The word I'd underline is tendency. The research describes how a person tends to interpret their life, which is a separate question from whether the hurt was real. Melanie's hurt was real. The way she was carrying it was the piece she could change.

She's blunt about where she thinks she'd be otherwise: "probably sitting in church, maybe on my third or fourth marriage, wondering why this always happens to me."

I said on the show that clear is kind. We usually think the kind move is to not bring something up. Melanie agreed that it runs against our nature. "We want to comfort the hurting person," she said. "But I was just continuing on a trajectory of pain if my thinking didn't change."

A sawmill and a 10-minute alarm

Garth's world came apart in his mid-30s. He'd been in ministry, walking young adults through dating and marriage. Then his own wife told him she wanted a divorce.

Years before that, they'd been through infertility and then adoption, and they'd fought to bring their kids into the family. Now he was a dad every other weekend, in a part of the country he'd only come to for a visit. He'd flown out to join his wife and kids at her family's, expecting they'd all go home together. At the airport she told him she wasn't going back. So he stayed.

For a while he had no home. When he finally rented a room, he couldn't bring his kids there, so he spent days at the house he was still helping pay for and left in the evening. He couldn't put his kids to bed. Later, with a short window to find a place, he bought an old condemned trailer and started fixing it up himself.

He was working several jobs. One was a night shift alone in a big sawmill doing security, cleanup and oil and lube, 14 hours a night.

When I asked if there was any happiness in that stretch, I assumed I knew the answer. He surprised me. Alone in that building all night, he started to enjoy his own company.

He also set a 10-minute alarm on his watch. "I don't know if I can make it the whole night, but I think I can probably make 10 minutes." He'd go a couple of hours like that, one alarm at a time, until he felt he could handle the rest of the shift.

Melanie had her own version. In the middle of the custody battle, there were days she reread Jeremiah 29:11 every 10 minutes: "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." She said it was like taking a breath of air.

Two people who hadn't met yet, getting through by the same unit of time. When the whole picture is too much to hold, 10 minutes usually isn't.

Choosing the hard that builds something

Both of them changed who they spent their time with.

Garth went looking for a men's group. His only open window was a Wednesday evening, and the group that fit it was about an hour's drive out of his way. He made the drive every week. When I said he'd given up comfort to do it, he corrected me. There wasn't any comfort to give up. "I knew I was not gonna live if I didn't pursue getting healthy."

Melanie went after healthy people on purpose. "Misery loves company," she said. It's easy to find someone with your exact trouble and feel understood. She sought out people whose lives she'd want, figuring that if she could learn to think the way they think, she could build the kind of life they had. Being in church every Sunday helped her find her bearings again, no matter where the week had taken her.

Then she said the line I've repeated more than any other from this conversation: "It's hard if you fight and it's hard if you don't. And so why not put your effort into the hard that's going to produce a change in the life that you want?"

I felt a much smaller version of that with our debt. When Emily and I owed $60,000, I remember wondering if I was a failure, and if I'd done my wife a disservice. Paying it off in seven months was hard. Staying in it would have been hard too. We picked the kind of hard that had an end.

"Okay, here's the deal"

Garth and Melanie met on a blind date at a coffee shop. About five minutes in, after the small talk, Garth looked at her and said, "Okay, here's the deal."

Then he laid it all out. He was divorced. Here's how far away his kids lived, how old they were, and the drive he made every other weekend to get them. Here's what supporting them meant financially. Here were some of his dreams. If she was good with all that, great. If not, they could enjoy their coffee and go their separate ways. He knew he'd be okay either way.

Garth jokes that he was going right for the heart.

Melanie surprised him. She laid out her own situation: a son who was already married, and she could be a grandma any day. What did he think?

She got emotional telling me about it. "I knew it was better to be alone than with the wrong person." She'd been single for almost 20 years. Neither of them needed the other, and that freedom let them be honest right away.

They were married 147 days after they met. (Melanie knows the exact number because she found it in a card she wrote Garth while they were engaged.) "We didn't give ourselves the luxury of falling in love with each other and then asking the hard questions."

I think that's what being whole first buys you. You can say the true thing on a first date, because you aren't afraid of losing what you don't need.

Blending is more like oil and water

If the story ended at the wedding, it would be a nice movie. It doesn't.

"A blended family is not at all like a smoothie," Garth told me. "It's more like oil and water. And you're putting it together, and if you want it to blend, you just keep stirring. But the moment you stop stirring, things are gonna start to separate."

Melanie said she was blindsided. "Garth and I love each other and we're happy to be together, but nobody else was looking for another person in their life."

That lines up with what stepfamily researchers describe. Psychologist Patricia Papernow, who directs the Institute for Stepfamily Education, points out that the adults in a new stepfamily are often hopeful while the kids are going through multiple losses. She writes that "children of all ages need time alone with their parents," and that "Successful stepcouples don't rush children into acceptance."

When I asked Melanie what she'd do differently, her answer was almost word for word what Papernow recommends. She'd have moved Garth toward more one-on-one time with his kids, instead of trying to build everything as a group. Garth's answer was about grace. "We don't know what we don't know," he said. You learn, you adjust, and you keep going.

Then they told me about the lake. Friends lent them their place for a week when the kids were teenagers. It went so badly they packed up early and went home. Melanie called it "sheer hell." The next summer, Garth's son asked if they were going back to the lake. Garth told him no way. His son couldn't understand why. "That was awesome."

As a dad, I needed to hear that. You don't know how a moment is landing for your kids until much later, sometimes years later. The trip you'd file under disaster might be the one they remember fondly.

They've been married more than 11 years now. Much of the family is close today, grandkids included. Not every relationship has come back, and they're honest that it still hurts.

Turn around and reach back

In 2013, Melanie published a book called I Don't Think So, a step-by-step guide built on what she learned rebuilding her own life. She told me that when the publisher said yes, she went home and curled up in the fetal position. Telling her story felt terrifying.

What got her through was realizing it wasn't about her. She called it "purpose beyond your own reputation."

The quote she holds on to goes like this: when you're going through hell, keep on going, and when you get through, reach back and take the hand of someone who is where you were and help them through.

The first half usually gets credited to Winston Churchill, but Quote Investigator found no evidence he said it. The earliest version they could find ran in the Christian Science Sentinel in 1943. The second half is the part Melanie and Garth live out, and I think it's the better half anyway.

Try this this week

Melanie's breakthrough was hearing that her thinking had a name. Here's a small way to look at your own:

  1. Pick the thing that feels heaviest in your life right now.
  2. Write down the sentence you tell yourself about it, word for word.
  3. Ask Melanie's question of that sentence: is this what happened, or a way of thinking about what happened?
  4. If the whole thing is too much today, set a 10-minute timer, do the next right thing, and reset it when it goes off.

If you want a bigger frame for where you're headed after that, the free goal-setting guide walks through the Six Fs: finances, family, friends, faith, fitness and freedom.

There's a lot more in this episode than I've written here, including the Christmas that finally worked for their family and their answers to the question I ask every guest: what does happiness look like to you?

So let me ask you: what's one thought you've been treating as a fact that might just be a way of thinking?

Listen to the full episode of The Currency of Happiness wherever you get your podcasts. If this was useful, send it to someone who could use it.

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