Show notes
🎙 More to Life
Season 24: Lost & Found | Guest: Mia Godfrey
⚠️ CONTENT WARNING: This episode discusses childhood trauma, abuse, addiction, grief, death, loss, and emotional pain.
What if surviving is only the beginning?
For much of Mia Godfrey’s life, survival was something she became very good at.
Growing up in Romania under communist rule, Mia experienced poverty, trauma, instability, and pain at an early age. Alcohol eventually became one of the ways she learned to escape what she was carrying.
But leaving one place does not necessarily mean leaving everything behind.
Mia would experience profound loss, including the death of her first husband and later the illness and loss of her sister. Through grief, addiction, faith, therapy, and the difficult work of finally confronting what had been buried, Mia began discovering that simply getting through another day was not the same thing as truly living.
Season 24 of Other People’s Shoes, Lost & Found, explores what happens when people lose something deeper than possessions—identity, purpose, hope, direction, faith, or the life they thought they would have—and what they discover as they begin finding a new way forward.
For Mia, getting found meant becoming willing to look honestly at what she had survived, the ways she had learned to numb the pain, and the possibility that the hardest parts of her story could become something more than wounds she carried.
The title “More to Life” is a nod to Steven Curtis Chapman’s More to This Life and to the question underneath this entire conversation:
Is simply making it through life really all there is?
Mia’s story suggests there is more.
Welcome to “More to Life.”
🧭 GUEST INTRODUCTION
Mia Godfrey is an author, speaker, Bible counselor, and life coach whose story has been shaped by trauma, addiction, grief, faith, healing, and starting over.
Her memoir, Buried, Not Broken: A Memoir of Survival, Sisterhood, and Starting Over, grew from experiences Mia spent years carrying quietly and from a promise connected to her sister.
Today, Mia uses her story to remind others that being buried beneath painful circumstances does not mean we are permanently broken by them.
Sometimes the things we thought would remain hidden become the very things that help someone else feel less alone.
🧭 EPISODE DETAILS
In “More to Life,” Neil and Mia explore:
🇷🇴 Growing up in Romania under communist rule and the experiences that shaped Mia early in life
🍷 How alcohol became a way of escaping pain rather than actually processing it
🧳 Why changing circumstances or geography does not automatically leave trauma behind
💔 The devastating losses Mia experienced and what grief revealed about the pain she had been carrying
🎭 What happens when we become good at surviving while quietly struggling underneath the surface
🧠 The role therapy played in helping Mia confront things she had spent years trying to bury
🙏 How faith became part of Mia’s journey toward healing, purpose, and a different way of seeing her story
📖 Why telling the truth about her life eventually became Buried, Not Broken
🌱 The difference between being buried by circumstances and believing those circumstances have broken you
👟 What it means to move beyond simply surviving and begin asking what life can still become
And underneath the entire conversation is a question that sits right at the heart of Lost & Found:
What if finding your way forward does not require forgetting what happened but discovering that what happened does not get to decide what your life becomes?
🧭 MEMORABLE TAKEAWAY
Being buried is not the same thing as being broken.
There are seasons when life can leave us feeling covered by grief, trauma, addiction, disappointment, or loss.
But sometimes what feels like burial may actually be the beginning of something being planted.
Survival can keep us here.
Healing can help us discover why we are still here.
And maybe that is where we begin finding that there really is more to life.
🧭 CONNECT WITH MIA GODFREY
🌐 Mia Godfrey Website
📸 Mia Godfrey on Instagram
📖 Buried, Not Broken: A Memoir of Survival, Sisterhood, and Starting Over
Learn more about Mia, her story, writing, coaching, speaking, and the message behind Buried, Not Broken.
Thank you, Mia, for trusting us with the difficult parts of your story and for reminding us that what has been buried does not have to remain hidden and what has been hurt does not have to remain broken.
🧭 LISTEN & FOLLOW OTHER PEOPLE’S SHOES
👟 Other People’s Shoes Website
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Subscribe to Other People’s Shoes wherever you listen to podcasts and continue walking with us through Season 24: Lost & Found.
Every story is an invitation to look closer, listen longer, and see life from a different perspective.
🧭 LEAVE US A REVIEW
If “More to Life” made you think about something you have survived, something you have buried, or whether there might still be more waiting on the other side of what you have been through, we’d love to hear from you.
📝 Leave Other People’s Shoes a Review
Your words help more people discover Other People’s Shoes and the stories being shared here each week.
Thank you for walking in Other People’s Shoes. 👟🩵
Maybe getting found begins when we stop asking only how we survived and start asking what we are still here to become.
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