From Mouthwash to Mindset: Kelly Sheehan on Going Blind, Hitting Rock Bottom, and Becoming a Hypnotherapist

Kelly Sheehan walked into 216 Coworking carrying what she calls her "bag of tricks" — an old house-call medical kit from a retired-doctor client, now stuffed with Louise Hay affirmation cards, oracle decks, and a treasure chest of trinkets. By the end of the conversation, host Logan Lewis had heard one of the most unflinching origin stories this show has recorded. Kelly is a hypnotherapist, mindset consultant, and founder of Soul Strategy, and the path that got her there ran through four DUIs, a corneal transplant, and a stretch of her life when she couldn't afford real alcohol anymore — so she drank mouthwash instead. This recap handles that chapter honestly because Kelly does too: not as a punchline, but as the rock bottom that eventually rebuilt her entire life.

From Rafferty's Honey Butter to $12,000 Bottles of Wine

Kelly grew up in Kennesaw — "which I like to call Kelly Saw for obvious reasons" — after being born in Massachusetts. Her parents split a week after her 18th birthday, a surprise that derailed her plan to study abroad at the University of Barcelona as a Spanish translator; her father's drinking, she says, is what actually kept her from going back for her sophomore year. She landed in restaurants instead, starting at Rafferty's ("the chicken tenders are so good, who needs the lettuce") before moving up to the higher-end Houston's, where, as she put it, "a couple of cocktails and I knew everything." Her first DUI came during that stretch — handled, like so many of her coworkers' DUIs, by the same lawyer everyone at the restaurant used. From there she became a reservationist at New York Prime near the Ritz-Carlton, married one of the managers, and started drinking wine at a bar stocked with bottles that sold for $12,000 a pop. "I thought that I was very, very fancy, very classy, and that I was handling things well," she told Logan. "That was not the case."

Her Father's Death and the Spiral

In 2010, while Kelly was on a work cruise to the Bahamas with her then-husband, her father went in for lung cancer surgery he'd promised to delay until she got home. With no cell service on the ship, she didn't find out things had gone wrong until they docked — and her husband's boss had to fly them back on a private plane so she could reach the hospital in time. Her father was placed in a medically induced coma, began withdrawing from alcohol on top of everything else, and passed away weeks later. "That is when I know for sure that my alcoholism absolutely jump-started," Kelly said. "I had absolutely no coping tools. None. Other than Kendall Jackson." She and her husband divorced, and she moved to Chattanooga on a whim after finding a house on Craigslist — taking a job, and eventually a second DUI, with her pug riding along in a hand-knit argyle sweater. She blew a 0.43. The officer on scene told her flatly that her calm, polite demeanor at that level was proof of just how functional — and dangerous — her drinking had become.

The Mouthwash Years

This is the part of Kelly's story that gives the episode its title, and she doesn't shy away from it. Once she became unemployable and money ran out, she discovered that a bottle of mouthwash had more alcohol content than the Chardonnay she'd been drinking — and cost a few dollars instead of much more. She started swallowing it originally to mask the smell of cigarettes at a restaurant job, "and then I realized I won't smell like Kendall Jackson either." She drank it that way for six months, sometimes decanting it into a Gatorade bottle so it wouldn't draw attention. She dropped to 94 pounds and was hospitalized repeatedly because her potassium was too low to keep her own heart beating. In January 2014, an ulcer burst through all five layers of her cornea and she went blind in her left eye. She had four DUIs by then and no coping skills left to stop. "If your brain is saturated in this alcohol and this poison," she said, "you don't think through consequences well." She got a cadaver corneal transplant that June, sewn in with sixteen stitches — and kept drinking mouthwash the day of the surgery and for weeks after, technically "following the rules" because her operation was scheduled for noon instead of morning.

The Cab Door Moment

Kelly's mother pushed her into Ridgeview, a rehab facility on South Cobb Drive — but the intake team initially told her she didn't qualify for the level of care she was asking for. She kept showing up, admitting each time that she'd gone home and relapsed, until she leaned on her insurance to get into a half-day outpatient program. Even then, she kept drinking mouthwash between sessions until a urine test caught the telltale enzymes. Furious and certain the results were wrong, she was climbing into the cab that had driven her there every day when something shifted. "I opened the door to get in the cab, and it was like this moment that wasn't me," she said. She turned around, walked back inside, and told the cab driver she'd be staying — she thought for an hour. It turned into a month. She hasn't had a drink since July 14, 2014.

Building Soul Strategy

Recovery led Kelly into a 12-step program and, eventually, certification as a hypnotherapist — though she said most of her client work leans on EFT tapping, breathwork she picked up studying Ashtanga yoga in Spain, and numerology she's studied for more than 20 years through Dan Millman's "The Life You Were Born to Live." She reads Logan's own numbers live on the episode (he's a 33 over 6, in the same numerological company as Agatha Christie and Stephen King, she notes) and walks through why affirmations like "I love and approve of myself" work: "Your words are your wands." These days she teaches breathing techniques in Ridgeview's Women's Trauma Unit and runs Soul Strategy full time, describing herself less as a fortune teller and more as a conduit. "Because I'm the chick that drank enough mouthwash to go blind," she said, "people feel available to tell me their deep, dark secret."

Listen to the Full Conversation

This recap only scratches the surface. Kelly also gets into her numerology reading of Logan's own life path, a spirited debate over whether birds are real, her surprise stint waiting tables for Lionel Richie at Houston's ("I ain't easy like Sunday morning"), her love of Shawshank Redemption, and her 5 a.m. frisbee-in-the-field routine with her dog. Catch the full episode below.