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When we think of grief, we often think of death. But grief can take many forms, whether it's the end of a relationship, a change in health, or simply realizing life doesn't look the way we hoped. Yet most of us were never taught how to navigate it.

Instead, we're left feeling overwhelmed, broken, and pressured to "move on." The truth is, grief is part of being human. It touches our minds, bodies, and spirits, and it doesn't follow tidy stages or timelines. Without understanding this, we risk judging ourselves and suffering more than we need to.

Recently, I had a conversation with master certified life coach Krista St. Germain about how the sudden loss of her husband transformed her understanding of grief. We explored why grief isn't one-size-fits-all and the practical tools that can help you ride the waves when it feels unbearable. Her insights offer permission to grieve in your own way, strategies to support yourself and others, and a reminder that even in loss, healing and growth are possible.

How One Tragedy Changed Everything

Krista's story begins like many of ours: with life feeling good and the future looking bright. She had recently remarried after a difficult divorce, and it felt like proof that good people exist and you can be treated well. But in less than 24 hours, everything changed when her husband was killed in a roadside accident while changing a flat tire.

What followed wasn't just emotional pain. Krista discovered that grief affects every system in your body. Your hormones go haywire, sleep becomes elusive, your nervous system dysregulates, and you face increased risk of serious health issues. There really isn't anything in your body that feels normal during intense grief.

This full-body experience often catches people off guard. We expect sadness, but we don't expect the brain fog, the physical exhaustion, or the way our bodies seem to betray us when we need them most.

Why Most Grief Advice Falls Short

The biggest revelation for Krista was discovering that most of what she thought she knew about grief wasn't helpful. The famous five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) were originally created in 1969 based on people coming to terms with terminal diagnoses, not bereavement. Yet we've applied this linear model to all forms of loss.

The problem isn't that these emotions don't exist in grief. The issue is treating them as a checklist or timeline. Real grief is messy, unpredictable, and unique to each person and each loss. Some people experience anger, others don't. Some bargain, others never do. There's no right way to grieve, and certainly no finish line where you're suddenly "done."

Acceptance isn't a destination you reach once, it's an ongoing process you're continually offered the opportunity to practice.

The Dual Process Model: A Better Framework

Instead of rigid stages, Krista advocates for the dual process model of grief. This approach recognizes that healing happens through oscillation between two types of activities:

Loss-oriented activities include thinking about the loss, feeling the emotions, and dealing with the practical aspects of what happened.

Restoration-oriented activities encompass everything else—work, hobbies, social activities, even scrolling social media or binge-watching Netflix.

Healing happens in the back-and-forth movement between these two states, not in staying exclusively in either one. This model gives you permission to take breaks from grieving, which many people desperately need to hear.

Supporting Others Through Grief

When someone we care about is grieving, our instinct is often to fix or comfort them with phrases like "everything happens for a reason" or "they're in a better place." These well-meaning comments usually backfire because they try to minimize or rationalize the loss.

What grieving people actually want is for you to witness their experience without trying to change it. They want you to be present with their pain, not solve it. Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do is simply sit with someone in their difficulty.

Practical support often works better than emotional platitudes. Instead of asking "What can I do?" try making specific offers: "Can I come mow your lawn?" or "I'm going to Target, what can I pick up for you?"

Simple gestures like bringing school supplies for their kids or sending a text that just says "thinking of you" can be more meaningful than trying to find the right words to make them feel better.

Supporting Yourself Through Difficult Times

When you're the one going through grief, supporting yourself starts with returning to basics. Your sleep will be disrupted, your routine thrown off, and your body will feel foreign. Focus on fundamental needs: gentle movement like walking, staying hydrated, and asking yourself "what would feel like love to me next?" Sometimes that's a shower. Sometimes it's getting outside.

Krista teaches several simple techniques for managing intense emotional moments:

Hand on heart breathing: Place your hand on your heart and exhale twice as long as you inhale while softening the back of your tongue. Both actions send safety signals to your nervous system.

Simple tapping: Tap gently on your collarbone or the side of your hand. You don't need to learn complex sequences—even basic tapping can help regulate your nervous system.

Peripheral vision exercise: Stare at a spot on the wall and gradually expand your peripheral vision, noticing how far you can stretch your field of view. This helps calm the nervous system during intense emotions.

The key is practicing these techniques when you're not in crisis so they're available when you need them most.

Permission to Grieve Differently

One of the most liberating concepts Krista shares is that there's no way to grieve incorrectly. Grief looks different for everyone and changes even for the same person across different losses. Some people need to talk about their loss constantly; others rarely mention it. Some cry frequently; others don't. Some want to be around people; others need solitude.

What matters isn't following someone else's timeline or meeting external expectations. What matters is honoring your own process and giving yourself permission to feel whatever comes up without judgment.

Finding Your People

Perhaps most importantly, Krista emphasizes the healing power of community. Don't stop until you find your people, whether that's a virtual room or a physical space where you feel understood. When you're struggling, it's validating to be around others who have had similar experiences and can reflect your reality back to you.

Being in a community helps you realize you're not broken or doing something wrong. Your experience, however unique, is part of the human condition.

The Possibility of Growth

While Krista is careful not to turn post-traumatic growth into another "should," she does want people to know it's possible. Post-traumatic growth doesn't mean being grateful for what happened or believing everything happens for a reason. It means deciding who you want to be after something difficult happens and what meaning you want to make of it.

Some people report greater life satisfaction after working through significant challenges, not because they're glad it happened, but because they chose how to respond to it. They asked themselves hard questions about how they were living and whether they wanted to make changes.

As Krista puts it: "There's nothing we can't go through that we don't get to decide what we want to make of and who we want to be in light of."

Moving Forward

Grief will always be part of being human. Life will always offer us experiences that don't match our expectations. The question isn't how to avoid these experiences, but how to navigate them with more understanding, self-compassion, and support.

Whether you're supporting someone through loss or navigating your own difficult season, remember that healing doesn't mean "getting over it." It means learning to carry what happened forward in a way that honors both your loss and your continued life.

The goal isn't to return to who you were before, but to discover who you're becoming now.

Listen to my full conversation with Krista St. Germain, where we explore the realities of grief beyond the five stages, the practical tools that help during overwhelming moments, and why permission to grieve differently can transform your healing journey.

TRANSCRIPT:

Disclaimer: The transcript below is provided for your convenience and may contain typos, errors, or grammatical inconsistencies, as it has not been professionally edited or proofread. Please enjoy it as-is and read at your own discretion.

Please note: The content shared in this podcast and blog post is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider for personalized medical guidance. 

Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I am so excited. Today we have Krista St. Germaine. She is a master certified life coach, but her area is really helping people with grief. And this is something that Krista, before I have you introduce yourself and I want you to tell your story and kind of your journey.

And I want everyone to hear it 'cause it's really powerful. But one of the things that I really find. When people are working on their health, there is no path that will not involve grief at some point. And so this is a topic, I'm kinda getting chills as we say this, much as I don't really think any of us want to have this conversation.

Like we don't wanna think that, hard things are going to occur or we wanna move past things really quickly. But the reality is this is part of the human experience. And so. Thank you for coming on because I really think that this is really gonna help a lot of people out there. So can we start with you just introducing yourself and just tell us a little bit about your journey?

Like how, how did you come into this area to help people? It was not part of the five year or the 10 year plan, I'll tell you that. So, yeah. School of hard knocks. Essentially, I'm, I just turned 49, but when I was 40, I had recently remarried. First marriage did not end well. Second marriage was like proof that, oh, like good, amazing humans exist and you can be treated well.

And it just felt like I was at a place in life where I really believed that my best days were in front of me and I was just on this high. And we had gone on a trip. I driven separately. We were on our way back from the trip, very close to being home. I had a flat tire. I pulled over on the side of the road.

He. Was a very stubborn man. I love him and he wanted to change the tire. He did not wanna call aaa, so baby, let me just change the tire, you know? So I'm standing there texting my daughter who was 12 at the time, to let her know that we were gonna be a little bit late. He's digging in between the back in, in my trunk, trying to get this spare tire out, and a driver that we later found out had meth in his system and also alcohol in his system.

And we're talking. It. The sun was out Sunday evening at five 30. Hazard lights fully on, did not see us, did not break, just crashed right into the back of Hugo's car and trapped him in between his car and my car. And so within really 24 hours less than that, I went from the highest of highs to O obviously a really big low.

And while I did have a great therapist from my divorce prior to, what I really quickly learned was that most of what I thought I knew about grief was not helpful at all. And later, fast forward right through a lot of trials and tribulations and just figuring it out myself and then discovering life coaching, I just decided I don't want other people to have.

That difficult of an experience. I wanna, part of the reason we have such a difficult experience is because we don't talk about it. Oh, totally. Yeah. So we can talk about it more and we can have an honest understanding of what it actually is like, not our expectation of what we've told it would be like, or, you know, outdated theories and information, but true, honest conversations, then we can have less suffering and we can have an easier experience.

Yeah. So. Just, you know, I think it happens a lot when you have a big shakeup like that, it makes you stop and look around and ask yourself if you're doing what you wanna do, if you're making the mark that you wanna make. And for me, the answer was no. And so, yeah, that's what I did. I became a coach.

I quit my job and that's, you know, now I coach widows. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I can imagine it's not easy to tell this story. Right. And, thank you for sharing. I agree. We don't talk about a lot of things there are so many topics I can think, and then the, you're right, the pain's through the roof when really it's already a hard experience and we're not taking away from that.

But if we had some other understanding, maybe we could, learn to work with it. I don't even know how to say a better Oh, that's hard to put the words. Yeah. It's just, yeah, no, it is. It's just like, can we, can we suffer a little bit less? Can we have expectations that actually line up with , the typical realities of grief?

Yeah. And so accurate information and tools that help and, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's, it's super powerful and so. I from, from my understanding, I think that grief can be really overwhelming to people. Like, none of us are coming to this world. Like I know how to handle that, right? It's like, it's like you said, like this, not, we we're not taught it.

We don't know. A lot of us do not have experience with this depending on, what experience we have or haven't had in life. And so I'm wondering, first of all. Can we start out with, are there ways that if someone in our life is going through this, have you found that there's sort of, I don't wanna say best practices, but like how can we support them better?

And then I wanna talk about how we can support ourselves, but is there mm-hmm. Are there things we should ask or, I mean, how do you handle that? Yeah. I'm glad you connected those two things too, because I think supporting ourselves is what allows us to support them better. Right. There are some kind of, some.

General do's and don'ts that I would suggest, , one do is just to be aware that grief is a full body experience. You know, it's not just the emotion of sad. It literally affects everything. Your hormones are off. You're not sleeping as well. Your nervous system is dysregulated. You have an increased chance of a heart attack and other medical events.

Your immune system can have problems like you have brain fog. You can't think so. There really isn't anything in your body that feels normal. Yeah. And so just knowing that and knowing that, of course they might be acting differently than you are used to them acting. And that doesn't mean they're doing anything wrong, or that doesn't mean necessarily that anything needs to be fixed.

It's just this is what happens when we have an intense grief experience. So I think It's good to know that, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's also good to know that if you are the one in that position, because if you aren't prepared for that, then you will think some of those things mean that. If there's something wrong with you or that you've done something wrong,, for instance, there some people would call this denial if they were using the five stages of grief, which is this whole soapbox I can get on about why I'm not a fan of that, but it's a very common experience to intellectually know that someone has died, but to still have our brain be expecting them to be there.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and if we don't understand, that's not denial. That is, our brain hasn't yet caught up with the new reality such that it can predict what, what actually will be happening. It's still trying to predict what used to happen and still trying to meet your attachment needs, you know, through those outdated predictions.

And so we do need time to pass before our brain will stop doing that. And in, in the interim, we just kind of need to let it be, you know? Yeah, yeah. I also see. Just we, we come from a culture, most of us, that has taught us that feelings are problems, and the goal of life is to be happy. And that if someone is not happy, that we need to try to do something about that, to fix it, to kind of, you know, we have this right reflex where we need, we see a wrong, a perceived wrong, and we need to right it.

And that will often have us saying things like, oh, they're in a better place, right? Mm-hmm. They, they would want you to be happy. You're young, you'll find someone else, at least they're not in pain anymore. Right? Saying these things that are kind of trying to find some sort of silver lining and make someone feel better, and that is the very last thing that usually the bereaved or you know, the person experiencing grief wants.

Usually what we want is we want you to be with us. We want you to witness what we're experiencing and we aren't broken. Right. We don't, we don't wanna be treated as though how we're feeling is a problem that needs to be solved. Yeah. And, you know, those are just some, some basic things, but, and we don't expect people who are in, in acute grief to know necessarily what they need or to ask for what they need.

That was what I was gonna ask, because I think that at least my reflex is always, what can I do for you? How can I be. Like, how can I help you? You know, and it's, I know when I, I, I'm, I'm gonna give a different example here, but my son was born premature and, you know, think very low birth, weight, nicu, all these things.

And I was just like, I don't even know what's up and down. Like I can't, yes. I can't sit here and tell you, bring me a meal, do this, do that. Like, and it's not that these people wouldn't have wanted to do all these things, but it's a hundred percent what you were talking about that I. My family that just sat there with me in the nicu, like that's what I needed, right?

Mm-hmm. I, I didn't need anyone to like say, oh, he's gonna be fine or whatever. Like, we didn't know any of that when he is three pounds, right? Yeah. Like you don't know any of that. So what you're like, the concept that you're talking about, I almost, I've heard it referred to as like just porch sitting where you just sit with that person and I've always.

That's just been really beautiful, but I think it's hard. And, and how would you, what advice would you give for people, how you can just be with that person? Because I think, like, like you said, we're always trying to come up with answers. So how do we not do that? Yeah. When that's our reflex. Yeah. I think we have to recognize that the discomfort that we feel in not doing something right is not a problem to solve.

Yeah. And we're, we're trying to solve our own discomfort. We're trying to solve our own, you know, we can't quite reconcile with what they are feeling and that we are powerless to help. Yeah. And if we can just try to make peace with that and let it be because we are powerless in that way, you know? And so are they, but also we are, we are powerful in that we can be there and porch it, we can be there and, and witness, right?

And, and that it doesn't seem like it would be. Maybe as helpful as it actually is, but man, I, I can tell you that for me, that those were the most helpful Yeah. Interactions that I had. I wonder if, you know, I, I feel like looking back on experiences, I remember the people that I don't know that like sent flowers or that there's like these little things and it wasn't even overly.

Like you said, there wasn't like comments of everything's gonna be okay, but, but yeah. The, the witnessing it is like they acknowledged what was happening but weren't I, I'm putting it together with what you're saying, that they weren't trying to change it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Even just like the little text messages, the, the little cards, the thinking of you, you know?

Yeah. Those kinds of things are helpful and I don't think it's necessarily. Ill advised to ask someone what you can do, but, but again, hold it lightly knowing that they might not know. And sometimes what can be helpful is just making an offering of, Hey, can I come do X, Y, Z? Like I had a couple of, uh, friends just come and mow my lawn.

You know, I had a friend of mine just go and buy school supplies for my kids. Can I do this for you? Or I'm going to target, is there something that I can get for you? What do you need? Or, you know, I would love to bring you X, Y, Z. You know, would you rather have this or that? Yeah. Beautiful. I, so kind of coming back to this, how people, uh, let's talk about like the, the person that's going through it, how it can feel really overwhelming.

I have several questions that are literally, I think all getting at the same thing, but I'm like, I feel like they're all different aspects of this, but what are maybe some gentle, realistic ways as someone's going through this where they can support their physical health? Like I'm thinking, you know, like sleep or nutrition movement, like they're in the thick of it.

And I feel like people feel guilty for this. Like either they shouldn't be doing it or, you know, there's just a lot that goes in that. So what, what would you offer to that person? I. Yeah, so definitely let's put a pin in the guilt. 'cause I think I, there's something else I wanna say about that, but all the things you just mentioned are beautiful.

Right. Just going back to basics of can I, can I, how can I gently move my body in a way that feels good to me? Getting out for a walk is such a brilliant thing to do. It sounds basic. Like, it wouldn't be that helpful, but it's actually so incredibly helpful, even just how it, it calms the nervous system, right?

You have that bilateral movement naturally with your eyes going back and forth from one side of the road to the other. Getting out in nature, grounding, yeah, hydration. Your sleep is gonna be a mess. So anything we can do to support sleep, like all of those basic things, anything we can do to support our nervous system, all valuable.

We don't need to overcomplicate it. Yeah, right. There's not like one magic thing that we need to do. It's just what is like that one person thing that I could do today? What does that, what, what would feel like love to me next? And sometimes that's a shower. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I feel like, uh, the routine gets really disrupted.

I feel like even like for, take grief outta this for a second. E, even in regular life when your routine gets disrupted, most people are just thrown. And so then if it's like some, a permanent change that now you don't already know what you're gonna get back to. Um, I can imagine that that's just, it's a hard place to be.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And, and if you're the kind of person who finds peace and security and routines, then maybe it might be very helpful for you to, to slowly work your way back into a routine. But sometimes I think the idea of routines as an internalized should, that maybe isn't what you need. And maybe you just need to give yourself permission to be like, okay, this isn't my normal routine, but what would feel good to me today, this afternoon?

Okay. Yeah. I'd like to, I'd like to get out and take a walk. I'd like to go to the bookstore. Yeah. Really good. Like more permission to do it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it sounds easy, but I don't think it's, you know. Yeah. Like actually listening to what you need. The, the other thing that might help people too is to understand, , the dual process model, which is my favorite grief theory.

And it, I love it because it does speak to taking a break. It speaks to self-care, it speaks to, um. It's just so graceful and easy. So the idea behind the dual process model is that if you take all the things that we do after a loss and divide them up into two buckets, we have loss oriented activities, right?

So thinking about the loss, feeling the loss, dealing with the logistics of the loss. It's all loss oriented things. And then the other bucket, we would label restorative, ah, restoration. Anything but. So that could mean gardening, that could mean Netflix, binges. That could mean scrolling on social media, right?

That could mean laughing. That could mean getting out hobbies, anything that really isn't the loss. And I know sometimes that can be hard when it's, when it feels like the loss affected everything. Yeah. But what the dual process model says is that healing is found in the oscillation. Hmm. Right back and forth.

Back and forth. And so what we are, what I love about this is that it helps us get out of where a lot of us are, which is that we have this inclination to either be all loss oriented or all restorative, right? We're like trying to only deal with it or only escape from it, and then we give ourselves a hard time about that sometimes too, right?

If, if. We believe that it's supposed to be all loss oriented, and then it's hard for us to take a break from that. Or we notice ourselves feeling, you know, feeling light or laughing and then we judge ourselves. We can make ourselves wrong for what's actually a really helpful thing. Yeah. Which is the back and forth.

And sometimes women specifically, we actually often need to plan the restoration because it isn't what we've been conditioned to do anyway. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ugh. It's like, so, okay. So it's like we're having to pick up another skill along the road essentially too, because mm-hmm. What you're describing, it's just so all or nothing.

And I think we have this in every single area of our life, right? Where it's like we need to all be here, all be there. Tell me, 'cause this model sounds very different than the five stages of grief. Tell me, okay. Can you tell us what are the five stages? 'cause some people listening might not be as like, indoctrinated as we were in the past.

Yes. What is it? And then what are your grievances and why, you know, why do you, why are you kind of picking the other model? The five stages are grief or denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And here's my beef with it. First of all, it was created in 1969. Okay, so. There's been a lot of new work since then, but we just kind of didn't talk about it.

Also, it was never really about bereavement. It was about coming to terms with a terminal diagnosis. Yeah. So it was an anecdotal study of people who had been diagnosed with terminal illnesses and they were trying to come to, to grips with it. And so Elizabeth Kubler Ross, by the way, this was important in its day, so I don't mean to diminish the importance of this work.

'cause at that point in time it was nobody was talking about it. So very important. So she wrote on death and dying, and then later took those five stages and implied them to grief and wrote on grief and grieving. Mm-hmm. And so my issue with it is not so much that I think it's wrong per se, it's the way that we've used it.

And even late in her life. Um, she, Elizabeth Kugler Ross. Wrote about how she regretted how people had used her five stages, especially after having more grief experiences of her own. She did not mean for people to make it formulaic or linear. Right. And that's how we, that's how we take it, is, oh, first I have to go into this place called denial, and then I have to get angry and then I have to bargain and that, right.

And then ultimately I reach this place called acceptance, and then I'm done. Hmm. And that is not how it works. We could, there every emotion can be experienced in grief. Right. Some experience, a lot of anger, some don't. We're not doing it wrong. If we don't have a lot of anger, we're not doing it wrong If we don't bargain.

Yeah. Right. And acceptance is not a one and done thing. Acceptance is something we, we are continually offered the opportunity to do. Yeah. Right. And so it's not linear it, it doesn't go in this nice little. Tidy boxes of stages, and we don't get to a place where it ends. You know, grief. My favorite definition of grief is that it's the natural human response to a perceived loss, right?

Yeah. The loss will always have happened. We will always have a response to it. That response might change over time. Right. We might integrate the experience into our lives, decide who we wanna be, what meaning we wanna make of it, but we don't get to the end where we no longer have a response and where it's over or we've moved on.

I. This is gonna seem really trivial, but with the, uh, people that I work with, when they get on medication to help them with their metabolic health, a lot of the time their relationship with food will change. Mm-hmm. And many people 'cause the people that are seeking me out, this is like a real challenge for them.

Right. Like, think like, you know, a hundred plus pounds to lose. Things like that. There's a real grief with that relationship changing and the food no longer being easy for them. And you know, and this might, a lot of people, I don't think can relate to this, but I highly relate to when they're telling me about this.

'cause I went through this and it's exactly like you said. You're not just like, okay, great, and I'm moving on and it's not there. And we, it's like you keep coming back to different areas of, well it was here at this time and maybe in the future I could rehab it, do this or that. And it's like. It's not stagnant like you're saying, and this acceptance mm-hmm.

Coming at different places. So yeah, that's, I, I can relate to what you're saying. Yeah. And I work primarily in the field of bereavement. Right. So I'm working with people who have lost someone who has died. But grief is so much more than that. It is. I expected something to go this way and it went that way.

And to me that feels like a loss. Yeah. Of course. And it can even follow things that we thought were positive, were gonna be positive, right? We were gonna, it's something we wanted and then we experience it and there's this huge sense of grief. Yeah. So when, when all these feelings are coming up for people, I mean, how, not how do you make sense of it, but like.

Okay. So how, how do you continue to support yourself? Like you were talking about, like, you can expect the times when, and again, correct me if I'm wrong, 'cause I'm, I feel like I'm learning a lot right now, that, you know, you can expect these, like the,, how are you saying this, you were saying the act, this dual process where there's mm-hmm.

Loss oriented activities mm-hmm. And then restorative., But how, like, how do you, day to day though, like, emotions are all over the place. You're going through, like, let's say it's in the acute phase. Totally. Like how do you, how do you navigate that? Yeah, I think it's really, it's a lot about surrendering to it and not making the experience that you're having wrong, right?

Mm-hmm. Sometimes, sometimes I will call it a grief grenade or a grief bomb, and. And, and if we can know that those are coming and that we didn't do anything wrong when they come. Yeah. And we have some ways that work for us to support ourselves through it to make it easier. You know, that's helpful. So even just like putting your hand on your heart and taking a few deep breaths and just labeling it, you know, this is the part where I have a grief bomb.

Yeah. Whew. That was intense. You know, , simple things like that can actually be quite grounding and helpful. . Yeah, and just letting it be like it. It is. An unpredictable rollercoaster sometimes, and just knowing that I think can make it easier because sometimes that's the hardest part is that something happens and you and your, your first idea is, what's wrong with me?

This shouldn't be bothering me so much. Why is this a problem for me? But it's not so hard for other people, right? And there's this narrative that we have that takes what actually is not a wrong experience and somehow makes it wrong. Yeah. Yeah. That comparative suffering is huge God, right? Yes. In all areas and mm-hmm.

That makes it even worse. It's already hard, what we're going through, and then it just amplifies it. So, and 'cause that was one of my questions, kind of how could we connect with our body more? So I, that's very simple, right? Hand on heart. On the heart. I'm safe right now just connecting with our body.

Anything else that in the moment is accessible to people that you find that works? Well, I'm a huge fan of tapping emotional freedom technique and so I teach tapping a lot, a lot of, I find that very helpful and a lot of my clients do too. And it doesn't have to be going through the full basic recipe.

Even just tapping on your collarbone or tapping on the side of your hand mm-hmm. Can be quite helpful. I, I think there's so many somatic practices too that can be helpful. One combination I love again hand. I, I tend to put my hand on my heart when I do this, but with my hand on my heart, I will exhale twice as long as I inhale.

So I slow down my breathing so the exhale is longer. And then as I'm doing that, I soften the back of my tongue. And both of those things send messages to our body that we are safe. Right? We can kind of relax into that. , Staring at a spot on the wall and expanding your peripheral vision. Mm-hmm. Right?

Just noticing the out the outsides of your vision and just giving the intention to keep expanding and seeing how far you can stretch your vision. All of these things help the nervous system and, and help make an intense emotion flow, flow through easier. Yeah. Oh, these are really good. I just did some of the, as you were saying this mm-hmm.

It's hard to relax the back of the tongue. It's weird, isn't it? Yeah. But it's, once you do it a few times, and again, I don't think it's like this is the one way you must do it. I think you try a bunch of different things and you do it. Some people love and I teach a lot, , bilateral movement, where you would just grab an object, you know, hold it in, start in your right or your left hand, and then move it across the midline of your body.

Yeah. And go back and forth, back and forth. Such an easy thing to do. You can do it with your keys or you know. Yeah. But there are so many different ways to, to support ourselves. We just need to experiment with a few of them so that we have them on, you know, speed dial. Yeah. And we can go to them quickly.

Like, I often say to people, I don't know if you experience this, but I'm like, we can't. I, I like, I can imagine when the grief bomb's going off, it's like a hard time to start something new. It's like we have to have practiced these things the other times. Yes, I do this with urges and cravings. I'm like, we have to.

Every day be practicing this as though we were at the game when it's happening. Mm-hmm. Because then when it happens, we're like, okay, I have access to that. And it's not like you're not in your prefrontal cortex. Right. Like, you're not thinking you're all in emotion. , I, I like that you gave us some ideas here.

'cause it, yeah, it is like, do the jeans fit? Right? Like, because some things are for me, I find resonate so much and others are just garbage. I'm like, it sounds great. It looks great. It just, it just, I can never in the moment get at it. Right. But like. The hand on heart thing for me is so easier. I, I really like, like, just kind of tapping on the chest area.

Mm-hmm. It, to me, it, it just resonates. And I don't know why it works. You know, I've done, 'cause I did a lot of tapping stuff in the past. I had a colleague that she taught a lot of tapping in my membership and it's like, this stuff is great, but only certain moves Can I remember? I can't remember the whole sequence.

Right. Yeah. I just can't. Yeah. Yeah. Even like, just a lip tap. Can be helpful, right? Because when, when you're in fight or flight, you, you don't need to digest anything. Yeah. So you, you, your salivation dries up and if you gently tap on your lip and you stick with it, then eventually you will notice you start to salivate, which is a sign that, oh my, my body is getting the message that I am safe and I can digest now.

But it is all about try some things, figure out what you like and what's easy for you to remember, and then that's what you go to and you don't make your experience wrong when you're having it. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That's really resonating with me when you're saying that because I'm thinking, , I'm sorry, I'm bringing this all back to food, which like, it seems so trivial with what you, what you're talking about, but at the same time, like I, I can see that, , long-term health for people sometimes is a real grieving process because they thought it was gonna look different.

They thought their health was gonna be different. They thought if they would just do this or that, that things would turn around and maybe it hasn't. And so there, there's a lot of this involved actually. Mm-hmm. And. And, and a lot of it, it's what you're talking about that maybe it's not wrong, how this is happening and you know, can we allow that and can we not judge it?

And can we, can we let some days be worse than others because they make it mean that every day is gonna be that hard. And I'm like, no. Maybe every three weeks to four weeks, you're gonna have a few days that are hard. But then the rest are gonna be magical and like we leave no room for any of that magic when we're think, when we're catastrophizing that, that those feelings on those days are carrying all the weight.

Yeah, for sure. And I also, I mean. I know. What you just said and how you're experiencing it, that it feels somehow trivial. But again, speaking back to comparative grief, I don't think that it's trivial at all. Right? I, I think we're all here on this planet having these unique life experiences designed to help us learn and grow in the ways that we came here to learn and grow.

And sometimes that's gonna look like spousal loss, and sometimes that's gonna look like a food struggle. Like, you know. Yeah. It, it can be so many different things. Um, yeah. And they all have pieces of it, which involve a lot of pain. Yeah. Yeah. What would you, would you have like a top, I don't know, two, three tips?

Someone that they find themselves in a really hard stage of life and it's feeling overwhelming. Their body feels outta control. Often they don't know any more their plan and where they're going and what's happening. What, what would you say? Maybe these are the, the top two, three things that I know we've talked about a lot today, but like, maybe this is where you could start or what you could think about.

It's so easy to forget them or to negate them. Dismiss them. And by basics, I'm, I really mean like what is my sleep hygiene? Am I moving? Yeah. Am I hydrating? Like some of these really basic, what does my body need? Because everything is so out of whack. Right. And because it's just sometimes we think, well, I'll just, I, I can get to that later, or I don't have time for that now.

, So going back to basics I think is huge. And then I think figuring out how do I let myself have a more supportive experience of the emotions when they come? How do I figure out how to like surf these waves in a way that works for me? And there's so many ways to do that. So many of which we just talked about, and so many that we haven't.

Right? Yeah. Um. But, but figuring that out is hugely important. And then also I think if we could just decide that there's no way to have the wrong experience, there's no way to grieve incorrectly. So we can just stop worrying about that. We can. 'cause I, I was like the a plus, give me the a I'm gonna get the a, I'm gonna read all the grief books.

I'm gonna get a gold star. Right? Yeah. But that's, that was where I was at that time. And man, that creates a lot of added pressure and suffering. So, so what I've learned is just everybody grieves differently. It's like fingerprints. They're all so unique. Everybody's experience is different and, and it's not even, each individual's experience is consistent.

Each individual's experience of grief from one grief to the next. Will be markedly different. Let's throw out all the timeline on sense Uhuh, right? Like we, we have this whole idea of the first year is the worst, or you know, somehow after a certain amount of time we're supposed to be doing a certain level of good or something. Uh, none of that is helpful. Yeah. Oh, this is so good.

Yeah. So coming back to the basics. Really, how can we support ourselves more with those emotional experiences and not thinking there has to be a certain way that's, this is like a masterclass. Thank you. Because I'm like, this is it. Just go through that people. I'm glad. Yeah. Just love it. Do you think there's anything that we missed today that's, someone that's, you know, kind of hearing these concepts for the first time, like there's gonna be people that have never heard any of this and do you think there's anything that's important that we didn't talk about?

I know there's obviously like hours we could talk here, but anything that you think. I mean, I always like to plant the seed of post-traumatic growth, and I find that a lot of people aren't familiar with post-traumatic growth or don't see it as an option or maybe even worse and receive it as a should.

Which is also not helpful. But post-traumatic growth is just, you know, the idea that, well, not the idea, but it's something that's been studied. It's, was coined in the mid nineties by a couple of researchers and before their work, what we thought was that. There would be this level of wellness that someone was experiencing prior to it, something that was traumatic, and they would either dip down and stay there, or they would dip down and bounce back and bouncing back was like the best we could hope for.

Right. And what they noticed was that there was this third group of people who, yes, they were dipping down, but they weren't just bouncing back. They were bouncing forward. Meaning they were reporting greater levels of life satisfaction and quality of life because of what had happened. Not in spite of it, but literally because of it.

Not that they wished that it had happened, not that they wanted it to happen, not that if they could get a do over, they would, you know, make it not happen. But because. That they decided who they wanted to be. After it happened, they decided what they wanted to make it mean. They decided to, to look at life and ask themselves, am I living the way that I wanna live?

Right? And so that's not morally superior. That's not a should. That's not something we have to do. But I think it's really nice to plant the seed that it's available to us. That there's nothing we can't go through, that we don't get to decide what we wanna make of and who we wanna be. In, in light of Oh good.

It's so good. It's so, yeah. Deciding what you wanna make it mean, ending up in a better place. Yeah, because I see this with a lot of things. People go through hard experiences and, and they say, I have no idea why. But like, that was okay, that that happened. You know? Like they, it's exactly what you're saying.

What they're looking back and making it mean and where they want. Um, maybe they change life directions after that. There's so many things that can happen. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Like, I don't look back and, and say, I'm so glad Hugo died. Oh my. Like, that's not my gosh, of course. How experience it, right.

Course I'm not grateful that it happened. I don't wish that it happened, but I, but I love what I have done with my life since it has happened, because it happened. I love how I have adjusted the way that I live and I love how much more in touch with my values I am. And you know that, that's what I'm talking about.

Again, it's not. It's not gratitude, it's not silver linings. It's okay, am I living a life that I wanna live? And, and in what ways am I not? And let me make some changes. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. I, I think people are gonna learn so much today listening to this. 'cause you, you gave so many, . Practical tools, also things to think about that there are no right answers, like just so many amazing things today.

Can you tell us a little bit about, um, tell us, uh, do you run groups? Do you do one-on-one? Like tell us a little bit about how you help people and where they can find you. Just everything that's going on with you.

Yeah, first, so I have a podcast. It's called the Widowed Mom Podcast, so I know that sounds highly specific, but if anybody is interested in learning more about grief and post-traumatic growth, then for sure take a listen to the podcast. It's also a great. You know, thing to listen to, to, to help yourself learn how to support other people who are grieving if you aren't currently.

My work is really focused on widows, and I do that through a group program where I primarily work with widows who are in what I call a grief plateau, which is where they're functioning, but they aren't loving life. Again, right. They have not yet created something that they love next and they really want that for themselves.

And then I have another program for women who are in acute early grief and are just looking for grief to be easier. So yeah. Beautiful. I We're gonna make sure to link all but no one-on-one anymore. I kind of phase outta that. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, but I can imagine, is it, did you find that it's more helpful in a group compared to, I mean, I imagine one-on-one's amazing as well, but that in a group, people can hear each other's experiences?

100%. 100%. And that's what made me switch to groups is I, I got full in my one-on-one practice and I kept having the same conversations over and over and over and over and, and what I started to see is that people didn't believe me. Right. They thought they were the problem or something was wrong with them.

And I kind of got to the point where I was like, oh, okay, we need to do this in community. You need to see yourself reflected in another human. And that's what I hear all the time is even the women who don't get coached and just catch replays, it's so validating to be around other people who have had a similar life experience and are going through something like you are.

And so that's another tip I would give people. Don't stop till you find your people. Yeah, right. Put yourself in a room, whether it's a virtual room or a physical room, or I don't care. Don't stop till you find your people just because finding them is healing. That I'm so glad I knew. Uh, like there's always a reason why we're talking like that comment Yes to that.

Because I feel that if you, if you never find your people, you keep thinking you're the problem, you never get anywhere. And then you always think it's like a certain tool that you need to have. You're like, there's a book I haven't read, there's a, you know, some random thing I haven't done. And it's like, no, you just don't, you're not around people that get you and you're always gonna feel, uh, like an outsider.

And that's not, it's not a good feeling as a human to, to feel like you're on the outside all the time. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally agree. I wish I, and I wish I had known that because I was such an introvert and I didn't value community, and I could have given myself such a more positive experience had I known that earlier.

I know, I know. I, I think about sometimes, like the way that I came into community was through Katrina Ubell. She had a program for women physicians with weight management and mm-hmm. And I think to myself, the level of friends that I made, the emotional understanding to things like it opened this whole world and I thought to myself.

Well, gosh, thank God I had these problems. It led me to finding,, some people that were really a growth mindset focused. Right. And I was like, Ooh, I didn't have that before. Friends that were really mm-hmm. Reading things and like expanding their mind and, and so yeah, it was like, yeah, it, it wasn't necessarily the best,, in my mind circumstance to go in, but what was, there was like, you found Eden.

You know, it's like that, that was worth it. Right? So, so, yeah. Yes. Life changing. Yeah. Well, I wanna say just thank you so much for coming on today. Again, we're gonna make sure to link everything down below and, um, I know I have learned so much. I know my listeners are gonna have learned so much. So just thank you for having taken the time today to, to really help us thank you for, for being willing to talk about grief. Amazing. Okay. Thanks so much.