In one of the most raw, heartfelt, and soul-stirring BET Talks interviews to date, Tashera Simmons—author, speaker, mother of four, and the former wife of the late rap icon DMX—sits down with host Miabelle Bocicault for a conversation that hits every nerve and heals at the same time.

Promoting her powerful new memoir Dying to Self: A Journey of Renewal, Simmons opens up about her life before fame, the abandonment that shaped her childhood, her spiritual transformation, and the personal resurrection that followed years of emotional turmoil.

“I had to kill her,” she says of her younger self—the girl who carried too much too early, who became a mother to her siblings after her own mother walked out and never returned. That moment—delivered with equal parts pain and power—sets the tone for a conversation that is deeply spiritual, unflinchingly honest, and refreshingly necessary.

Tashera, who met DMX (Earl Simmons) when they were just kids in Yonkers, shares how their trauma-bonded love story began: him robbing a woman with his dog, Black, and her catching a glimpse of a boy who’d forever haunt her dreams. “He told me when I first met him, ‘I’m just passing through, probably die when I’m 30,’” she recalls, a heartbreaking prophecy that nearly came true.

Despite the fame, Simmons says, it was never about the glitz. “We were broken kids,” she admits. “We loved each other deeply, but we didn’t know how to love ourselves yet.” That love—fierce, chaotic, and often destructive—would give her four children, years of public heartbreak, and the foundation for her future testimony.

Throughout the interview, Simmons doesn't shy away from the hardest truths. She talks about staying in a house that nearly foreclosed, parenting through trauma, and breaking a generational cycle of abandonment and addiction. “I told my kids, we might lose this house, and we might go to a shelter. But we’re gonna survive. That’s what I learned from all of this—we don’t die. We rise.”