The Life Shift | Conversations About Life Before and After
by Matt Gilhooly
The Life Shift shares real and honest conversations about the moments that change us. Host Matt Gilhooly sits with guests as they tell true stories of life-changing events, unexpected challenges, and quiet awakenings that shaped who they are today.Each episode offers meaningful and candid storytelling about grief, healing, resilience, identity, and growth. These are the personal stories that remind us what it feels like to be human. These are the turning points that stay with us.If you are drawn to personal growth, emotional well-being, or stories of how people rebuild after loss, this show offers a gentle place to land. Listeners come for the life changes. They stay for the connection.New episodes every Tuesday.For more information, please visit https://www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com
Episodes
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I Lost My Brother, My Parents, and My Husband: Pamela Joy Dlugos on Grief and Faith
Have you ever had an ordinary afternoon that turned out to be one of the most important of your life? Pam was 38, living a life she calls a blessing, with a loving husband, great friends, and a house that was always ready for the next party. Then one afternoon around her pool, she got to know her...
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My Father Said Life Just Went So Fast, and I Finally Wrote the Book
Content note: this episode includes a conversation about death with dignity and a family history of suicide. Is there a room in your life that you still go back to? Jennifer Griffith was 13 when her mom told her she had a brother, and when her dad told her he did not want to be there anymore....
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Leaving It All Behind: How I Found My Voice After 35 Years
Have you ever carried something you were handed, a belief, a role, a way of seeing yourself, and wondered how much of it was ever really yours? Margaret was born in an old hotel in Switzerland, into a community that believed giving yourself fully could change the world. She grew up traveling with...
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What I Learned Supporting My Mother Through a Conscious End of Life
Have you ever wondered what you would say if someone you love told you they were ready to go? Most of us put that conversation off, and it waits for us anyway. Oliver spent about twenty years far from Switzerland, in Japan, the UK and Australia. He came home for one year, and stayed when his...
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She Woke Up Paralyzed on Her Honeymoon and Finally Questioned Her Checklist Life
Maybe you have ticked every box and still wondered why the feeling never showed up. The degree, the job, the right age, the right house. You reach the milestone and happiness quietly slips over to the next one. Charu grew up believing a good life was a checklist. On the first morning of her...
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I Went Undercover After My Partner's Suicide
Content note: this episode includes a detailed account of discovering a loved one's suicide. Todd Maguire spent twenty-seven years with the Queensland Police Service, most of it as a detective, including two years working undercover under a new identity: Donny Wilson. But the badge and the alias...
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How I Survived 50 Seizures in Two Months
Content note: this episode includes discussion of suicidal thoughts and a crisis hotline call. Travis White was twenty-three, newly engaged, and by his own description living the dream when his body started sending signals nobody had taught him to read. One ordinary night, studying for a web...
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Stranded at Sea When the World Shut Down
Content note: this episode includes discussion of sexual assault and an abusive relationship. Sometimes the yes that changes everything looks, at the time, like an escape. Angela Harger Thompson has been a storyteller since she was four, waving a feather duster in her sister's home movie. At 30,...
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She Stopped Talking to Her Alcoholic Father for 15 Years. Then He Named Her Executor.
Some goodbyes don't come with a conversation. They come with a phone you keep picking up and putting back down. Brittany Perham grew up in a house full of friends and happy memories, with a mom who protected her and her brother, and a father whose drinking nobody named out loud. In college, when...
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Coming Out as a Trans Woman at 45: The Filter That Changed Everything
Some of us carry a weight for so long that we forget it isn't supposed to be there. Chloe Kelly spent 35 years being very good at being someone she wasn't. She learned the rules early. Play sports. Earn man points. Don't stand out. Never let anyone see. She got so good at the performance that…
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First Responder Mental Health: What a Helicopter Crash Opened Up
Maybe you know what it is to be the steady one. The person who shows up, holds it together, and makes sure everyone else is okay before anyone thinks to ask about you. Jeff Abbott has been that person for more than 25 years in emergency medicine, most recently as a Critical Care Flight Paramedic...
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How I Survived the Death of My Dear Friend and His Family
Maybe you know what it is to lose someone in the middle of building something together. To be left holding a piece of unfinished work and a hole where a person used to be, with no idea how to carry either one. Jan Becker is a filmmaker who set out with his close friend Christian to make a...
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What If You're Not Crazy, Just Intuitive? The Reality of Living with Unseen Perceptions
Some of us have known something about ourselves for a very long time. And we have spent just as long trying to pretend we didn't. Kate Saint Clair grew up seeing and hearing things no one around her could explain. She was the curious kid who asked too many questions and got lies as answers. The...
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His Life Finally Felt Settled. Then He Got the Call at Lunch.
Maybe you know what it is to finally exhale. To reach a season where the noise quiets down, the plan starts to work, and for the first time you let yourself believe things might actually be okay. Ryan was 24 and living in Denver when he reached that place. He had married young, moved more times...
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Belonging: Finding Family Among Strangers
Maybe you know what it feels like to hold everyone else together before you are old enough to hold yourself. To learn young that love can leave, and that safety is not something every kid gets to keep. Robin was eight when her mother died. By eleven, her father had chosen a new life over his...
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Buried Memory: The Session That Changed Everything
You know the version of yourself you built to get through. The one who keeps the peace, reads the room, holds it together so no one else has to worry. Maybe you have wondered who you would be if you ever set that version down. This week I sat with Tarah and EJ Kerwin, two therapists who spend…
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Showing Up: The Day I Stopped Trying to Fix It
Have you ever loved someone and felt the fear of losing them arrive in the very same breath? Most of us learn early to look away from that fear. Brad learned to look right at it. Brad grew up the grandson of Auschwitz survivors, carrying a fear of death that felt older than he was. As a boy, he...
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Identity: The Injury That Cracked Tyler Bramlett Wide Open
Tyler spent years building what the world told him success looked like. The abs, the car, the company. And the world cheered him on. He drove his dream car home one day, pulled into the driveway, turned off the engine, and felt completely empty inside. He didn't know yet that emptiness was trying...
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What He Heard: Six Words That Moved Him Across the World
There are moments in life when someone says something so simple, so obvious, that you almost miss it. And then it stays. It rewrites everything. Joomin Hwang had been dancing since middle school, performing since college, and quietly watching Broadway clips on YouTube long before anyone told him…
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Midlife: The Night He Asked If He Would Fold
Maybe you’ve had a moment where you looked around at your life and didn’t recognize it. Not because it was bad, exactly. But because everything you’d been holding together had finally stopped holding. That moment has a weight to it that’s hard to describe. And if you’ve been there, this episode…
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Blissful Ignorance: The Character Who Saved His Life
Some people live their early lives in what Dave Raymond calls blissful ignorance, and he'll be the first to tell you that isn't a bad thing. Growing up as the son of a legendary college football coach, stumbling into becoming the original Philly Fanatic, Dave spent decades inside a life that felt...
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Cancer: The Diagnosis That Stopped the Reinventing
Have you ever been so good at becoming what people needed that you forgot who you actually were underneath it all? Taira Soo did that for almost fifty years. Different rooms, different versions, a new self for every chapter. It felt like a superpower. It was also a way to keep from being seen.…
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Devotion: Writing Someone Else's Story to Find Your Own
There are moments that don't make sense until much later. And then there are moments that make total sense the instant they happen, even if you can't explain them to anyone else. Kate Clinch sat in a small chapel in Sydney, a self-described non-believer, and felt something she had never felt...
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147 Days: Raising and Losing My Sister
If you have ever loved someone so much that you quietly rearranged your whole life around them, this conversation will feel familiar. At twenty-two, Andrea Wilson Woods got the phone call that split her life into a before and an after. Her mother no longer wanted to be a mother, and her...
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Rock Bottom: Where the Most Fulfilling Life Began
There is a version of you that other people count on. The one who shows up, who fixes things, who holds the whole thing together. So what happens when that version can no longer do the thing that made it yours? Robert spent thirty-two years as a surgeon. Then an accident took his hand, and the...
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Starting Over: You Can Lose Everything and Still Be Okay
Have you ever built a life so carefully that you forgot to ask whether it was actually yours? Lora did everything right. The good girl, the good student, the good wife, the good mom. And then, right on the edge of an empty nest and a little freedom, she found out her husband had been living a...
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Anger: The Drink I Never Stopped Drinking
Have you ever quit the thing everyone could see, only to find the thing nobody could see was still running the show? Zach Brittle is a couples therapist who spent decades certain that alcohol was the danger. He grew up afraid of becoming someone he wasn't, carrying stories about drinking that…
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Surrender: The Wave That Changed Everything
Have you ever kept moving because stopping felt more dangerous than going? Pat knew that feeling better than most. He filled his life with travel and sport and constant motion, not because he loved being busy, but because stillness was where his hardest thoughts lived. Then on an ordinary foggy...
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Reclamation: Coming Back To The Girl Who Got Shut Down
Have you ever lived a life that worked, on paper, and still felt like you were only halfway in the room? That is where Lena Fein spent most of her life. Not broken. Not miserable. Just partially there, ever since a moment at seven years old when the safest place she had, her own diary, got read…
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Choosing the Harder Door: From Childhood Shame to Federal Prison
Some secrets get handed to us before we are old enough to know what to do with them. Ranae was a preteen in a small Minnesota town when she was sexually abused by boys she had known her whole life. The instruction that followed- stay quiet, or people will think you are bad- became the quiet...
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Comfort: When Cozy Becomes a Cage
Have you ever noticed your life getting smaller without ever deciding to shrink it? Not all at once. Just one canceled plan, one closed door, one quiet no to something that used to feel possible, until one day you look up and wonder where all the room went. That's where Scott Stirrett found…
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Fatherhood: The Fifteen Minutes That Changed Everything
Have you ever looked fine on paper and still felt like something was missing. Good job, good marriage, kids who love you, and underneath all of it, a quiet hum of not quite. Drew Norton knew that hum well. He was drifting through his late twenties, chasing money because he thought money was the...
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Illness: When the Hard Thing Sets You Free
Have you ever had a feeling in your gut that just knew, that told you to keep going even when nothing around you confirmed it? Carly had one of those since she was a kid. And then, somewhere around thirty, it went quiet. If you have ever lost the thing that used to steer you, you already know how...
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Identity: More Than the Thing You're Known For
Have you ever performed feeling completely fine while everyone around you assumed you were falling apart. Kate Kayaian knows that feeling from the inside. She spent four decades as a professional cellist, the kind of career most people only dream about, and on the night that career quietly ended…
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Self-Worth: The Life She Fought For
Some decisions cannot be made with a chart. Joy Kong knows this because she tried. Three days and three nights of careful, logical reasoning, and still she could not talk herself out of what her gut already knew: she needed to leave China and find her own life, even if she could not explain why....
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The Cost of Quiet: Learning to Speak Up After Years of Silence
Have you ever built a life that looked exactly right from the outside, and felt completely hollow from the inside? This episode is for you. Colette Jane Fehr grew up watching her parents argue in a house where conflict felt dangerous. So when she fell in love with a man whose family never raised...
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Introducing Trivia, Sort Of: A New Spinoff Show
This is a bonus drop, a little different from our usual Life Shift episode. I just launched a new show called Trivia, Sort Of. It's lighter, it's playful, and it's less "guess the answer" and more "here's a strange, fascinating fact, wait really?" I wanted to bring it to you here first, since...
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Writing Your Own Story: When the Fire Reveals What Matters
There are moments in life when everything falls apart at once. The job, the relationship, the car, the sense of direction. And then, in Laurie Collister's case, the house itself. A neighbor's forgotten french fries started a fire that took nearly everything she owned. But somehow, a...
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Identity: The Job That Wasn't the Whole Story
There's a version of your life where you take the safe path. The familiar one. The one that makes sense on paper. And then there's the version where you say yes to something that sounds completely ridiculous, and that version turns out to be the one that teaches you the most. David S. Bernknopf...
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Adoption: The Brothers He Never Knew He Needed
Some questions live quietly inside us for so long that we forget they're there. Not because they don't matter, but because we've learned to keep moving without an answer. That's where this episode begins. T. Alex Blum was adopted as an infant into a privileged East Coast family. He always knew he...
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Adoption: The Chapter You Thought Was Finished
Maybe you've always known something was a little off, like there was a frequency everyone else could tune into that you just couldn't quite find. Rob Lynch felt that from the time he was a kid, a quiet, persistent sense of difference that he couldn't name. When he was eleven, a Brady Bunch…
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Survival as a Calling: The Boy Who Decided to Get Up
Some people spend their whole lives searching for the thing that animates them. Rich Harwood found it the hard way. He was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in 1960 and told he had three to five years to live. His family went on a death watch. Doctors called him a lemon. He grew up in hospital beds,...
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Survival Into Service: The Night a Dog Changed Everything
Some stories ask a lot of you. This is one of them. But it gives something back too. Karen Diskin-Dickson grew up in a house where silence was survival. From her earliest memories, she carried fear the way other kids carried backpacks, always aware of what the next moment might bring. She was a...
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The Hero's Journey: Finding Yourself in the Story You Already Lived
Maybe you've spent years showing up as a slightly different version of yourself depending on who was in the room. Maybe you learned early that being liked was safer than being known. If any of that lands, this conversation is for you. Peter Bailey grew up carrying something heavy: the feeling…
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Start Here: What Is The Life Shift?
Hi, I'm Matt Gilhooly and I host The Life Shift – a podcast about the moments that change everything. When I was eight years old, my life flipped upside down. For a long time, I didn't know how I would ever process it. That's a big part of why I created this show. Each week, I sit with someone…
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Resilience After Amputation: Rebuilding Life From the Ground Up
Some stories don’t begin at the hardest moment. They begin with what comes after it. Scott Martin was 35 years old, coaching at the collegiate level, rubbing elbows with national team players at a Nike camp outside Chicago, when his body quietly started failing him. A fever. A bad night. A doctor...
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Lemon-Sized Brain Tumor: The Life That Grew After Surgery
Some moments don't announce themselves. They arrive as headaches you explain away, as an MRI you schedule between school pickups and client calls. And then your phone rings ten minutes after you get home, and everything you thought you knew about your life gets quietly rearranged. Jen Dary was…
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How Misha Brown Got Sober and Learned to Be His Own Best Friend
Somewhere along the way, most of us learned to take better care of other people than we do of ourselves. We know the right things to say. We show up. We hold space. And then we go home to the version of our life we haven't quite told anyone about. Misha Brown spent years doing exactly that. A...
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Under the Surface: The Shark Attack That Taught Tim Thomas to Trust
Some moments arrive quietly. This one arrived with teeth. Tim Thomas spent most of his life moving through the world one decision at a time, eyes forward, gut leading. Fighter. Special Forces operator. A man who found clarity in high-stakes moments and chased them because that was the only place…
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What Happened to You: Breaking the Cycle Sixty Years in the Making
Some of us build an entire life before we realize the foundation was made of survival, not solid ground. If you have ever pushed hard, achieved big, and still felt like something underneath you was quietly trembling, this episode is for you. Kathleen McKune grew up in a home marked by abuse,...
About this show
The Life Shift shares real and honest conversations about the moments that change us. Host Matt Gilhooly sits with guests as they tell true stories of life-changing events, unexpected challenges, and quiet awakenings that shaped who they are today.Each episode offers meaningful and candid storytelling about grief, healing, resilience, identity, and growth. These are the personal stories that remind us what it feels like to be human. These are the turning points that stay with us.If you are drawn to personal growth, emotional well-being, or stories of how people rebuild after loss, this show offers a gentle place to land. Listeners come for the life changes. They stay for the connection.New episodes every Tuesday.For more information, please visit https://www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com
Hosted by
Matt Gilhooly