Mikayla Matthews says her chronic illness experience was cut from ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.’ She’s ready to tell her story.

Last year’s Hulu reality hit The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives lifted the curtain on #MomTok drama and “soft swinging” scandals. What it didn’t show, according to star Mikayla Matthews, is the grueling health challenges she was facing at the time.

“The first week of filming Season 1, I had just got my breast implants taken out [out of concern over breast implant illness],” the 25-year-old reality star tells Yahoo Life. “I had lost like 12 pounds, my eyebrows were falling out, my hair was falling out.” She was also struggling with chronic eczema that left her with rashes that were visible onscreen but were seldom addressed. “I had eczema growing up, but it was like a whole ’nother level. I was dealing with a whole bunch of infections and different things. It wasn’t something I could hide.”

All of this took a mental toll. “I was in such a bad mental place just because that’s when I was at the lowest with my chronic illness,” she says about filming the show’s first season. “I was like, I just have no energy to even do this. But I was still showing up.”

She also used her time in front of the camera to talk about her chronic illness; most of it wound up on the cutting room floor, taking a back seat to juicier storylines. “I thought I was going to get more in-depth on the show [about] my chronic illness … how it’s affected me and my mental health and my family, my relationship. But … the context wasn’t there,” says Matthews. “People were like, ‘Oh, what happened to this girl? Why is she having rashes?’ So they gravitated toward my social media.”

TikTok, where she currently has 2.9 million followers, has become her main outlet for telling her story. It’s where Matthews has chronicled years of worsening skin conditions, including eczema, molluscum contagiosum and a fungal infection called thrush. Since May 2023, her happy-go-lucky, family-focused content has included updates about her exposure to black mold, her weakened immune system and the many tests and treatments she’s sought out to make her feel better.

“You name it, I tried it,” she says, listing off liver and parasite cleanses, a heavy metal detox and ozone IV therapy. Matthews also posted videos of her husband, Jace, assisting her with Dupixent shots. But most importantly, she showed the reality of what it’s like to be a mother of three living with a chronic illness.

“I had just a three- [or] four-month period — and unfortunately it was [while] filming the show — where it was debilitating,” she says. “I wasn’t able to take care of my kids. I wasn’t able to do daily tasks like get up and take a shower; it was a whole ordeal. Going to bed was so hard because I was in so much physical pain.”

The discomfort interrupted her sleep; some nights she got only two hours of rest. Adjusting her medications and steroids also “had a huge impact on my hormones and my mental health,” she says. And feeling as though she didn’t look like herself only made it worse. “It’s definitely still triggering and not fun to look back on,” she says about wearing little makeup and comfy sweats throughout most of season 1. “I just felt so low at that time.”

But she survived Season 1. And with Secret Lives of Mormon Wives back on the air, she’s ready to thrive. Where does Season 2 — which premiered Thursday night — find her? “Sticking to regular therapy,” Matthews says. “I always knew everything that was happening to me [externally] was happening internally, but I wasn’t thinking as far as trauma. I was thinking it’s my gut, it’s my liver … but what’s stored in your gut is that trauma. And so you kind of have to pick it out one by one.”

She says that therapy was something she got into during the show’s first season and continued when the cameras picked back up for Season 2. It happened at the right time, because Matthews then found out she was expecting her fourth child, went off some medications that weren’t suitable for pregnancy and decided to go all in on addressing her mental health.

“That’s what healed me, honestly, is like finally speaking up for myself and working on myself,” she says. “The more I let go, the more I started healing.”

Part of that healing process has involved opening up about enduring sexual abuse as a child — something that she tells Yahoo Life she hasn’t discussed in about a decade. Though she plans to fast-forward through these sensitive scenes when she’s watching the show, she hopes the conversations resonate with viewers.

It’s all part of the growth she has experienced since she made her reality TV debut last fall. “A really great benefit from the show is that it does put you in these positions [that] you wouldn’t normally be comfortable in, and I think that’s where you see the most change,” says Matthews. Now she’s looking forward to people seeing the bolder, healthier version of herself in Season 2. “I felt like I held back a lot less and I said a lot more of what I was feeling — a little too much.”

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