The 5 Stages of Grief Debunked? | Cole James and Mike Strick

Cool. Thanks for having me. Look forward to our discussion. Me too.

So I guess Mike, if you I want you to pick it up wherever you want, you know, in terms of how you got into the world of hospice, kind of the work you were doing in that environment and kind of and then again, maybe how the grief recovery method when that kind of entered your your sphere and kind of how you ended up applying that in your work as well. I think that's a good place to start if you're good with that. Okay. Yeah, that's fine.

So I guess, you know, to make a very long story short, I went to I went to and did my undergraduate and got degree in business and actually in marketing and a couple of years out, I went and worked for a number of different companies, a couple of years out. I really had this desire to kind of do more with my work and be more involved in like helping people. And so I looked into a number of different things kind of in the mid 90s, decided I was going to go back to graduate school to become a therapist. So started taking classes and went that direction was trained, you know, as a therapist and worked as a therapist for a little bit.

But even after just being in that world for a while and and kind of realizing some things that were just, you know, a little bit, you know, hard for me to deal with there. I decided I wanted to kind of step away. And I was really called to do death and dying and grief and loss work. And that's something that I had come up when I was in graduate school.

And when I moved from the west coast back to Ohio, I decided I was going to kind of make that leap from, you know, more kind of traditional counseling kind of stuff into into hospice. Plied for a job here. Let me let me ask you a question about that. That's that's interesting, right?

Because I've found, you know, there's kind of, I guess, two, it's unique, let me say, to for me to speak with people who just want to dedicate themselves to death and dying and grief and all those kind of things. Obviously, a lot of the time it's because of losses we've endured. And other times it's just a general interest in that topic or a general desire to help people with that because maybe you've seen that play out in other people's lives. Can you, would you mind just staying on that a little bit just more about the decision-making process, where that interest or that calling came from to transition from therapists to hey, I really, I know I want in graduate school, I figured this out.

Can you walk us through a little bit of that? Yeah. So again, graduate school is very traditional counseling therapy, you know, that type of thing. And I, you know, I obviously had a lot of my own losses, you know, during that period.

But a couple things transpired, a couple things happened while I was in graduate school. This is an interesting one. I started to actually have conscious out-of-body experiences in 2001. And it completely changed the way I looked at the world and completely changed the way I looked at death and dying.

And I mean, it made me realize that I'm clearly much more than this physical body. You know, I'm having these conscious experience where I literally have transcended my body. You know, and I guess people have near-death experiences and they go into this other realm or this other world. And basically, it's the same kind of concept that's going on with these out-of-body experiences.

And I've had a lot of them, a couple hundred of them. And it really, it's you. And how old were you? How old were you when that phenomenon started to happen?

I was 31. Okay. Wow. So you're already an adult, right?

This is not something you're familiar with. And then it comes in adulthood. Correct. I mean, I, look, I remember that it happened on September 20th, 2001.

And like, I didn't know what it was. I didn't know what it was. And I'm in school, so I was talking to people in school about the experience. I got some books.

I ran into a couple of people who kind of had these experiences before. They fed me some more information. I started looking this more. You know, and I think all this, you know, is very tied in with my own, you know, search for myself or my own search for what is God, what is source, what is all those things.

So it's all kind of coming together at that time. But and excuse my ignorance. But is this when these, when the, when the first one happened, like you said, you very clearly knew when it happened the day and everything. Was this during the day?

Are you asleep on this happens? Is this like a dream state? Yeah, they would, yeah, they would happen a little bit. They would happen at night.

And the way it would work is I would usually wake up in the middle of the night. And then, and then as I was falling back to sleep, that's when they would happen. And what I realized after a while, I could actually initiate them. So I could, there were some steps I could take when I would wake up in the middle of the night because you're very, very, very relaxed.

And and you could literally initiate them yourself at those times. So that's, that's when they were, that's when they were happening. So anyway, to, to step away from kind of the details of that, it really changed my focus and my way of looking at the world. And you know, again, took away, I'm not, I'm not going to say I have a complete, you know, disregard for fear of death by the Church of the Imagination.

But it's certainly, it's certainly put a big, you know, it's certainly helped with, with my ability to look at death and dying from a different realm and different light. And so somewhere in there, I was really just, I felt very cold and it had already kind of come up while I was, while I was looking at internships in graduate school. Yeah. And so when, like I said, when I moved from, when I moved from the West Coast back to Ohio, I decided I was going to, you know, kind of delve into the hospice world and see if it was a fit for me and work with people around, sit with people at bedside.

You know, sit with families at bedside, you know, when their loved ones dying. Do follow up work with them, you know, which I thought would be a natural thing for me to bring my, you know, counseling background, you know, kind of into that. And, you know, I, well, and let me stop there. Let me stop you for one second, Mike.

That's an interesting point, right? Because I think generally people that are, you know, just, just coming upon our work, there's obviously the human experience of death and dying, right? And then there's the human experience of grief and trauma and emotional pain. And often, obviously, those can intersect.

So what I mean by that is if I am a patient in hospice and I am dying, I am also grieving. I'm also going through emotional pain, right? But then there's this whole other realm of the family members, right, who are going more purely through a grief experience watching their loved one die. And so obviously those intersect at times, but in terms of how we treat someone who is dying, there's going to be elements of it that obviously aren't relevant for the family that's grieving and vice versa.

So I just want to point out to the audience, right? So Mike, and correct me if I'm wrong, but what I'm hearing is Mike through kind of these out-of-body experiences, discovers his interest in spending time and assisting people in kind of that process of dying. And then also, you know, what a great fit you've already have this kind of caregiving therapy background. So you're already connecting the dots.

I can help the family as well, right? So I just wanted to clarify that is we as the grief recovery method, I wouldn't say that we're regularly helping people who are dying. Mostly we're helping the family and the people in the aftermath of the death, or we're, you know, if they're actively grieving something going on, that is who we're helping. So that's another reason Mike, I wanted to have you on because you have really worked on both sides of it.

And that's another reason I have tremendous respect for all of the people who do our work, who are in the hospice realm, because they are working with people who are dying, where I am just working with people who are grieving, not to minimize that, but you guys are working on both sides of that, right? So anyway, go ahead, Mike, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, but I just want to clarify that point for people listening. So I got this, so I got the role, it's actually, it's really interesting, and you kind of look at it as meant to be, but it was the very first, the very first day I was looking for work when I was back here, I came across this bereabent corner position at this place called Crossroads Hospice in Cincinnati. And I'm like, oh, that's perfect, that sounds exactly what I'm doing.

So I applied for, I applied for the job, and this was very fascinating, you know, I, just there had been, there were some other connections like my mom had just started volunteering with the same hospice up in Northeast Ohio in an office up there. So she was able to talk to the executive director up there and make the connection back here. You know, I had the, I had the interview a couple days later, I got the job and I was there for the next 15 years or so. And it really gave me the opportunity to do, to do two things as you kind of pointed out.

I sat at bedside with, I mean, I can't even count all the people I've sat at bedside with. I've been with a number of people who've taken their last breath. I've been with the family, sitting with the families is all this is going on. I was with patients, you know, leading up to that, you know, so a couple weeks out, a couple months out, whatever it is.

So that was a part of my work, especially up front the first five years. I spent a lot of time with actual patients, you know, doing that, you know, kind of sitting, sitting with them and that type of thing. And probably the last, and I was doing the grief and loss work, we would follow up for 13 months with the families of our patients after they died. So my job was to do that follow up work.

You know, the last 10 years, it was because as we grew at our office, I was much more focused on doing that follow up work. Although I did all that follow up work the first five years, it was a combination job. And then it really became purely, mostly follow up those last, those last 10 years. And here's the thing I'm going to, I'm going to say, I started leading a grief group right away when I got to hospice.

I just, it was just a drop in grief group. And I got people to come in and it was okay. I came up with educational stuff and those kind of things. But I began to realize, and this is, this is kind of the tie-in degree for recovery.

I began to realize pretty, pretty quickly that grief is not, grief doesn't present like you always hear about. And also I realized that I had taken one class in graduate school on bereavement, death and dying grief and loss kind of stuff. So I did not have a lot of experience, you know, with that. And I was like, boy, I could really use some more tools around this.

And also I realized there's no stages of grief. Like it just doesn't present in that manner. And when you're working with people on a day in, day out basis, you quickly realize that, that, you know, everyone is walking through this in a massively different way. And you're usually just not dealing with the grief from the death.

They're dealing with the divorce that happened two years ago that they still have a process. They're dealing with the astrangement from their daughter. They're dealing with the job loss. They're dealing with all these other things.

So when they walk in the door, yes, they're dealing with the death of their mom, but it's not just the death of their mom. And so you, I realized that, you know, the tools I was using just weren't quite enough to do the job that I really wanted to do. And so about six months after I was at hospice, I ended up going through grief recovery method training in Columbus with actually lowest hall, who I now work with, interestingly enough. And I went through that four day process and was completely blown away by the tool.

You know, I worked on my own loss in there. And you know, that's another discussion we can have, which is, which is really interesting about my experience in there and kind of what I realized. But I, but the tool itself and kind of this step-by-step process structure that takes a person kind of from beginning, you know, to an end in a seven or eight week, you know, session or session process was really helpful for me in the training. And, and then, and then when I came back to hospice after the training and I did my pilot program, the results I got from the couple of folks who were in there were quite remarkable.

Like people were like, wow, this really changed me, this changed my life. Maybe I want to lead this kind of thing. And that was the very, very first one that I led. And I was watching people use these tools.

And so I was kind of in after that. Like I was like, this stuff works. And it's pretty much, I basically, I led more than 120 grief recovery method groups through hospice over the course of over the course of those 15 years. And it's pretty much the only tool that I used because it was so highly effective in what it was doing.

And I always tell people it's like, there's no way I could have stayed working at hospice for 15 years if I didn't have grief recovery. And the reason being is this, if I was literally just sitting and listening to people and trying to just comfort people with, you know, platitudes or don't worry, you'll get through this or, you know, time heals or just hang in there, whatever it was. If I didn't have concrete tools to use with people, it would have literally been like beating my head against the wall because I would have watched people come in and I could have sat there during their rawness. And of course, that would have helped them.

But I wouldn't have seen them go anywhere necessarily. Right. And so what I was watching is I could hold space for them in their rawness. And then, and that was very valuable for those first couple of months or whatever it was.

And then when they were ready, if they were ready, they would then come in and join one of the groups that I led or the classes that I led, however, you want to tell this really a combination of class and, you know, personal work group, whatever it is. And, and then I would watch them kind of shed layers and, and, and work through and see little physical, see emotional, see, see tangible changes in people. And I wouldn't see, I wasn't the only one seeing tangible changes in people like in the group, people would be like, oh, Mary, you, you, you look different that, you know, you're, you look different this week than you did, you know, when you first walked in, you're like, I'm hearing this all the time. You know, and then I would give out surveys at the end of these groups started doing it right away just because I was like, I want to see what the feedback coming in as an over and over and over again.

It was like, this changed me, this changed my life. This was so helpful. I'm, I'm going to shout this from the roof. I'm going to tell everybody about this.

I'm going to refer people like over and over and over and over and over again. And I've stacks of these kind of views. And I'm like, this is the tool, you know, that is, this is the tool I need to use. This is the tool that I'm going to promote just because, just because this works.

And again, it allowed me to stay as long as I did really, you know, because again, when you see transformations in people, it just, it doies you. It, it enlivens you. I wasn't doing the work. They were doing the work.

I was holding the space. I was creating the environment, the safe environment, right? I was creating the, you know, creating the space for this group to kind of come together and for people to feel heard, whatever it was. And again, it was very enriching.

It was very empowering. It was really, you know, remarkable stuff to kind of walk these people through this. I just love your, your story arc of, of how you came into it. And, and, and again, because here's the deal.

A lot of the people, a lot of people that say, hey, I want to come get certified or get tools around grief. Really, they're only frame of reference out there in the world. Really is just their own personal grief that they've had, right? Which obviously can feel very overwhelming.

And plenty of education that we all think we need around grief is just our own losses, right? But the problem is, is that we don't have any frame of reference on recovery or tools that that help help people with grief and loss. And really, what we have been kind of just given in society is the five stages of grief, right? Now, the problem is and you kind of briefly touched on it, but we haven't touched on it yet on the podcast.

I want to go here for a little bit. The five stages of grief were originally the five stages of death and dying, you know, and this book was written by this lady named Elizabeth Cooler-Ross. And at the time, to have a woman come in and say, hey, we're not treating our dying people very well. And we need to really like look at all the things going on in her turmoil that they're having and how we're treating them and the dignity that we're giving them or not giving them.

It's in a, she's a remarkable woman. So I'm not trying to speak bad about Elizabeth Cooler-Ross. But what I do really need to do here is highlight for the listeners. The five stages were designed for someone who is dying.

And again, people even debate the five stages for that. And I'm not here to do that. But basically, if you are bargaining or you're in denial or you're angry about the diagnosis, like that all makes tense. Okay, but what happens in a lot of society is we say, wow, these stages work so good over here.

Let's just kind of put them over here on this other thing. Or, you know, the 12 steps of alcoholics anonymous work so good for alcoholics. Let's just do it for deaders or, you know, whatever. And we just go, it works so good over here.

It'll, maybe it'll work over here. But the problem is, is, is it doesn't, right? And so like what Mike is saying is, and I'll just speak from my own experience real briefly. My dad died several years ago and we had hospice come weekly to come help us as he was dying.

And I already had respect for hospice personnel. And I can't tell you how much more respect I have for hospice personnel now that I've been through the hospice experience. My mother, my sister, myself, we all had these questions on how to help him and how to treat him. And all these things we didn't know because none of us had ever had had a dying father, a dying husband in the home with us, right?

So this is very unfamiliar to us. And we had this gal she would come in every week and she was like our hero. And we were like waiting for her to come. We had a list of questions for her.

The hospice we worked with was so great. But again, like Mike said earlier, part of me grieving is my father is dying in front of me. But there are five or six or seven other grief events going on for me for my mom, for my sister in there. I just want you to be aware that it's absurd to think that my emotions in those months where he was dying would be neatly in five places.

Like it is this concept of five stages with all the different emotions we have. Mike, let's let's take some clients like you've already highlighted some things. But another thing I see in hospice a lot, right? Is we're grieving.

Let's say we're grieving the moms and hospice and she's dying and dad has already died. And we have four siblings and two of them aren't even showing up. And now we have we're grieving our relationships with our siblings because we don't think they're doing what they need to. And then my other sibling is positioning because they care mostly about the will and who's getting the inheritance.

Now we have a loss of trust in them, right? And then after the death and at the funeral and the memorial, things happened outside of our control because someone else was the executor. And then we have further loss of trust in the spouse of our sibling. I mean, I can't tell you how I don't even like the word compounded grief.

I don't believe in that term. But I will say this when we have one loss, usually there's five, six, seven other grief events in there. And so to believe that we can just be neatly in five stages is flat out absurd. And I have to say it that directly because we've been battling with this for 30 or 40 years, simply simply because of the fact that the five stages of death and dying got into academia and into colleges.

And then and then just through kind of semantics, the word just got switched to five stages of grief. So you'll hear references to five stages of grief all the time still, by it from lay people just referencing them. And I just want you to know as a listener, obviously you're interested in this topic on some level, whether you're personally or you're interested in helping others. But literally that model throw it out the window for grief. 100% just don't buy into it because as Mike said, he's in this field for just a short amount of time and immediately becomes clear that the five stages are not right.

They're irrelevant. They're not designed for this experience that a lot of people are having in the grief process. And so just discarded. Again, the problem though is this I'm first seeking out to get certified or learn tools, they make sense because I don't have a frame of reference.

I don't have enough education on this topic to really decipher, hey, this makes no sense. And that's just simply because you haven't been around enough grieving people. But as soon as you get into the work of hanging out with grieving people, you'll very quickly understand, yeah, this person has anger with 200 other emotions. And this person has zero anger because that's not the relationship that they're grieving, right?

And so anyway, I want to turn it back over to you, Mike, but I just wanted to stay on that for a little bit. Yeah, so I'll give you a practical example of this. And here's a funny story going back on this anyway. When I, right before my interview, I'm like, well, I better brush up on my stages of grief.

So I got it was your rust book. And I read the whole thing because I'm like, they might ask me questions about this or whatever I need to at least. That's only tool we have in the whole world. I better save that I know what I'm talking about.

And like I said, I got in there and I realized this doesn't work this way at all. And let me give an example, like, and I've given this example a lot of times. Let's say you and I are our brothers, okay? Let's say our dad dies, okay?

You're really, really close to dad. You were the oldest son. You've always been the favorite and everything else. And you just had a bond with dad.

You guys just did everything together, okay? I came in a couple of years later. And you know, I wasn't as tall as you and I wasn't as good looking as you, and I wasn't as smart as you. And quite frankly, dad didn't give me the time of day.

He always compared me and quite frankly, we butted heads and everything else, okay? So we have you and I have very different relationship. You're really close quite frankly. I haven't talked to dad.

I hadn't talked to dad, but once a year, maybe for the last six years. So I really don't have a good relationship. In fact, you know, you stayed close to home and lived near dad. So you could be around him all the time.

I moved all the way across the country, okay? Are you and I going to be grieved the same way? Not even close, not even close. You're grieving from the perspective of like best friend.

Always been there for you and everything else. I'm grieving from no, no, Mike, I disagree. We're going to be in the exact five stages and that's all we can do. And we're going to flow through each of those stages perfectly.

Right. I'm literally so different. I'm looking at from self-adjusted perspective, but it goes even deeper than that, right? Not only are you close to dad, right?

And I'm not close to dad, but you're an outgoing person. You have a great support system. You've got a strong faith. You've got a really good family support system for you.

A lot of great friends. You're very solid in your work community and everything else. So you're buoyed by these things, okay? So to help with your grief, you've got all these things.

Me, you know, I'm not in a good family situation. Maybe my faith isn't as strong, you know, or I don't believe in God whatsoever. Or, you know, and maybe my work situation is a little rocky and I don't have that financial stability that you have. Just those things alone are going to change how you grieve, right?

So the different factors in your life, okay? And then we add in what are the other losses that you've had throughout your life? I'm not even talking about in the last year, two, three, four, five years. Of course, you have those, but throughout your life that you've actually never worked through, right?

And so, let me give this example. Let's say that, let's say that again, you're really close to dad. You've got all this great support and everything else. But let's, let's say that your, your wife is thinking that she doesn't want to be in a relationship with you anymore.

And, you know, so you're struggling with this, you know, impending divorce, right? And your kids have taken the side of your wife. So now all of a sudden you're so strange from your kids. And that's going on at the same time that your dad just died, right?

So now you have these multiple things going on, right? That are going on for you, okay? Here I am. I'm out on the West Coast.

I didn't have a good relationship with that. I don't have a good support structure with every else. And let's just say I just started a new relationship with someone and the relationship's going great and they're there to support me, right? Do you see what I'm saying?

And I've also dealt with the loss of a job from a year ago. So I'm still struggling with that. But I do have this, like, it's so complex. Like, it's so complex from the relationship that you have with what you lost to the things that surround you in your life that can be supportive or unsupportive to multiple losses or other losses that you've never worked through that are rising to the surface when this happens.

It's such a complex scenario that I, that's an immediately when I was like, stages of grief, I'm throwing them aside. I need another tool. And what I found again when I went through grief recovery, which was quite remarkable was it allowed people to do, then do their individual thing within the context of a group community, but to work on things and to work on things one thing at a time. You know, so it was very, so it was very, very helpful.

I don't know if that makes sense that when I say that stuff. No, it absolutely makes sense. I appreciate you articulating it that way. And the reason that we have to be, and I'm just going to say this, there are large grief organizations and their whole model is around the five stages of grief.

And we have been a thorn in their side for decades, because we can't sit idly by and be quiet about this, because it gets people stuck for years. Going down a path or funneling people into stages that they are not in or may never be in, right? Like you said, Mike, the fact of the matter is, is when we've had a relationship for 20 or 30 or 40 years, there are so many different emotions playing out, both on that of individual grief event, and then all the other grief events that we are unfinished with from the past as well. I mean, like another part of that scenario, Mike, like with the two brothers, one of one of the brothers, sadly, has been grieving the loss of his father for decades, even though his father was living.

And one of the sons, seemingly wasn't grieving. So the grief is so much different, because one son has been grieving the loss of his father, and he came to that realization maybe when he was in his 20s, or maybe when he was 10, wow, dad doesn't care about me like he cares about my brother. So there's not five stages here. You know, one's been grieving for 25 years, and one's been grieving since last year when we got the diagnosis that dad's dying, right?

Completely true. Also, yep. Right. For the simple fact that I don't like people wasting their time or opening their heart or being led or given hope that something will help when it when it was designed for something completely different, if your foundation is wrong, if your if your tools are completely off, if if they were applied for something else, and then just kind of cobbled together and slapped on something else, you're not going to have a good outcome.

So for my the rest of my life, I will be dispelling the myth about the five stages of grief. They were the five stages of death and dying, and that's a whole separate debate in hospice, and I'm honestly I'm not even equipped to have that debate. I'm not an expert at dying or hospice or anything like that, and I try and stay in my lane. I'm an expert at grief and helping people with grief, and the five stages of grief are irrelevant.

They're obsolete. They never were the right fit for grief ever, and be very, very wary of anyone or any coaches or counselors or therapists that use that model, because another thing I want to really touch on quickly with you, Mike, earlier, when you're in school getting your your master's in counseling, you know, Mike, I think you mentioned you spent a semester or a half a semester on grief in the totality of your education. And if you're listening this, that might may sound insane. You know, you may be thinking, oh, Mike just had kind of a school that wasn't heavy in in grief training for their counselors.

But unfortunately, the sad, sad fact is that is not the case. I work with hundreds and hundreds of therapists, and I train many therapists, and I'm big fans of I'm a big fan of therapy in general. I think there's good therapists. I think there's not great therapists, just like any other profession.

So, but don't please don't misunderstand me. I'm not bad-mouthing therapy or mental health, but I will say this, most therapists get about a half a semester on grief completely in all of their education and how to help you as a client. They they know very, very little about grief, the topic, and they certainly don't have practical tools at how to help people with that specific human experience. Obviously, the problem is is every client they will ever work with, either even if it's not the presenting issue comes to them with a whole backpack full of grief.

In the course of you working with them, they're probably going to have some massive loss events, right? After they move on from working with you, they're going to have grief and isn't it wild and sad that our mental health professionals, you know, kind of our leaders in society around helping people with emotion basically have no framework at actually helping people with grief, right? And luckily, that's why we exist. That's that's really our bread and butter is like this one specific area of expertise, grief, and grief recovery more importantly than grief.

We have tools for people. And so, anyway, I appreciate you bringing that up and we can we can move on. I mean, there's so much I want to talk to you about Mike. So we can flow wherever you want to go.

Yeah, yeah, let me go back to I want to go back to actual training because I think different than a lot of folks going into the grief recovery method training. I didn't go in there because of it like a loss that was going on. Now, look, I had plenty of loss, right? But I didn't walk in there like, Oh, I've got this huge loss.

I'm going to work on and blah, blah, blah, blah. I went in there because I wanted a tool as a professional to work with someone. And I had done I'd seen a lot of counselors and therapists, you know, in the kind of 10 years prior to when I when I went into the grief recovery training in 2007. And this was the really interesting thing that came up for me in that training.

Okay, like I said, I didn't walk in there because I was like, in fact, I didn't even know I was going to work on lost to the truth. Like, I had no idea. I'm like, I'm here for this training. I'm going to get some tools and not go off and do my thing.

And they're like, Oh, you're going to work on your own junk. I'm like, what? No, don't give it away, Mike. I'm going to do this.

Go right. Right. So this is really fascinating. I had a route like I I got my butt kicked between 1994 and 2004 2005.

I just flat out got my butt kicked. And when I did that loss history graph, I realized it became very apparent to me why I had struggled so much. And remember, I'm I'd seen counselors and therapists throughout that time. So I was working on things and I was in graduate school during that time too.

And so I and again, I'm working on things. But what became very apparent when I laid out that graph was the accumulating or cumulative effect of these losses. Right. And so I've got this cup.

Right. And I'll just give you a snippet of these things like I during that 10 year period, I'll just give you an idea. I had three romantic relationships that ended and then they were, you know, ones that were significant enough to me to kind of chop me at my knees, you know. So I had three of those happen during that 10 year period.

I had a grandmother die and a 54 year old aunt die during that time. And and I was old enough to kind of realize was good. Made me look at living and dying and again in a little different way. And that was before the out of body stuff.

So I had those I had those deaths during that time. Let's see. What other what else transpired during that time? I lost three jobs.

I was laid off from three different jobs. So I was out of work three different times in downsizing and those kind of things. And again, that really throws you, especially when you think I'm a pretty capable guy. I know what I'm doing.

I have this education blah, blah, blah, blah. Really throws you. I had physical stuff. I tore, you know, I was an athlete and I was still playing in two soccer leagues in a basketball league and I tore my flexor, Halleus tendon, misdiagnosed, ended up with blood clots in my right leg and hospitalism.

And it's completely, I mean, I still have problems with my leg to this day from the damage from the blood clots. So I had this physical stuff. And that took me away socially from what I left both physically it changed my way of being in my body. And socially that was the crew I always hung out with.

Do you know what I'm saying? And all the sudden I'm missing out on that social aspect of those things. I also ended up losing. I ended up at a company and just this is a funny story.

I ended up a company. It was a startup. They went public while I was there. I got all these stock options.

I'm sitting on $3.2 million for the stock options. It went public on NASDAQ. This is in this is 2000, 2001, right? I'm thinking I'm, you know, going to be pretty set for the rest of my life.

I'm just going to let this grow. I exercise and hold this stock. I actually borrow money to exercise and hold the stock because I'm going to hit a grand slam. The stock market crashes, 9.11 happens.

All these other things happen. And literally the stock goes from 200, it's split. But the stock went from $212 to share to $1 share. I'm thinking that's going to rebound and come back and it never did.

So not only do I lose out on obviously potential money and I could have cashed in, I could have cashed in about a third of that right at the time. And again, I exercise and held it. So I'm sitting on this, but then I would all turn it to the minimum tax because when you exercise and hold. So I end up on the IRS six figures and I have no money to pay.

I assumed I assumed I assumed I was going to have the money to pay for. It wasn't a big deal. I end up with nothing and end up in a three year offer and compromise back and forth negotiation with the IRS basically liquidating all my everything that I owned to pay back the IRS. So all those things are happening in this 10-year period, right?

The three out of relationships, the three job losses, the losing the money, the losing your health, the couple of deaths, all that stuff is going on. I'm working on it. But it wasn't until I literally stopped and this is in 2007 and I look back and I'm like, no wonder, I gave myself, I finally could give myself some ease and some grace in my own heart to be like, no, you got your butt kicked and these things were just layering and layering, layering, layering, layering on top of each other. And yes, you're working through things, but not to the extent that you need to.

And so you're end up with a stack of stuff. That was a very, very helpful for me and very eye opening. And then in the actual training, I grabbed one of those relationships and worked on it and had this kind of aha moment and thought, I don't know, maybe they'll come back and like the feelings just never did. So I was able to pick off other things and go back in and pick the other things off one at a time in that period kind of thing.

So that was, I just want to explain that that was kind of that was the aha I had during that during that training experience was. And again, coming from a place where I'm like, I've done a lot of work, but I had never looked at it through the same lens or from the same perspective. And that training really helped me to kind of do that. So that's it.

That's a thank you for that. That's a great point. And one that's hard to kind of for us to describe, but essentially there's a lot of tools out there that are discovery work, right? And some just get speaking openly to another person and discovering feelings or events or that, you know, just figuring stuff out emotionally can can feel amazing.

And I think there's great value to that. I think that what separates us is we focus on what we call completion work. So not only are we trying to help people discover and find awareness, which again, I don't think we're the only game in town. Obviously, there's a lot of places where you could pay and spend some time on on discovery of things.

The problem is discovery doesn't necessarily equate to feeling better, right? Or feeling finished with something. You said something really important there, which I want people to know is earlier a couple sentences ago. You said, basically I kept thinking it would come back those feelings and they didn't come back.

And I love that because that is completion work. That is what the grief recovery method excels at. Not just talking about stuff and rehashing stuff and identifying that was hurtful and talking about feelings. Again, that's all healthy stuff.

But if if the work stops at discovery, although at times we can feel like we've got to the other side just by discovering it, really we haven't. We need to shift over to completing those feelings so that they don't come back. And that's again, I think the differentiator between what we do and what other people do. I have no doubt, Mike, all these people that you were working with in the mental health space over the over that decade.

Like you said, you were working with people, you were actively working on it. I have no doubt that that stuff was was helpful for you. And you had covered some really good ground there and it was all productive. But then to look at it through Newlands, through the land specifically as grief and unresolved loss, because again, I'm willing to bet a lot of the mental health professionals you were working with, we're not saying, hey, Mike, everything you just mentioned, that's all grief, that's all loss.

And I'm going to show you a specific tool on how to approach that. I'm guessing that didn't happen. And then, again, not to take away what they did, but then you come to this other thing and you look at it through another lens, which is all of that is grief. And we have a way at how to very thoroughly identify all of the relation, all of the emotions in this one loss event or this other loss event.

And then not only identify them, i.e. awareness, but then also move towards completion because I don't want to keep stirring those feelings up for the rest of my life. That's the whole point on why I'm here doing this work. So, no, I love that. I love that.

Where do you want to go next? The floor is yours, my friend. You know, I guess I could talk about, you know, touching on what you just said that that I described about these feelings not coming back. That was one of the things that I started that, again, that one of the things that really cemented me using the grief or government of tools with clients at hospice was, and again, it happened in the very, very first pilot program that I did.

I had people kind of described to me, boy, I feel so much different and so much better than I did. And then they would kind of secretly say, I wonder if this stuff's going to come back. And I started to get letters from people and I started to get phone calls from people. Sometimes it was a year later.

And they'd be like, Mike, I just wanted to touch base with you. I feel so different than I did when I walked in. And the things I worked on, like, that haven't come, like, I kept hearing this, like, over and over again from people that what they were working on seemed to have some sense of lasting effect in their life. And it was very, I don't know if I know if I can use the word to describe it.

I just, I felt so buoyed by that, you know, like, here I am, I'm supporting people with a tool that they are having these, these, these changes can't happen. I mean, I've had probably 30 people through the years tell me they got more out of this eight session. Maybe they came back and worked on a second or third loss for another four or eight weeks, eight session, 12 session, 16 session program, then like 20 or 30 years of therapy. It was really, again, upfront, it was a little bit, it was almost a little off putting, you know, to hear that, right?

And I'm like, really, you know, no kidding, right? So, yeah, that same thing that I described, I started to see in kind of everybody else too. So again, the takeaway is we are focusing on completion work. We are focusing on our hope, our goal is for people to give us a call afterwards and say, Hey, that thing that's been haunting me every night before I go to bed or that thought or every time I drive past that intersection or I see where the accident happened.

Like I have this gut wrenching pain and hurt and then that sets off this whole chain of events where I'm thinking about it for the next couple of hours. Like that's gone. I don't do that anymore. Like that's why we keep doing this stuff.

Let me tell you a quick story, Mike. So I was working at at a large media corporation. Let's just say that and you would know it if I said it. And I'd been there seven years and I had friends there and I had success there and I could have had a good career in this in the entertainment industry.

And one day I got called into my boss's office and my boss was on the phone with my cousin who they they were friends and I was friends. They were all three of us friends and they told me on speaker, I have really bad news, but your cousin Blake shot him shot and killed himself last night. And I was so crushed and devastated by that. And I had I had all of these hopes and dreams and expectations for the future that were not going to be met.

And I had all this anger about his decision. And it really it really rocked my world. You know, I'm in my mid 20s at this point and it rocked my world. I you know, I never thought I would be part of the grief for every work.

You know, I was always like, great job, dad. Go help people. And it wasn't until kind of my 20s and late 20s where grief started kicking my butt. And on a whim, one time, one day I called my dad and said, can I go to one of your courses?

You know, just like the course you went to, Mike, you know, years later. And it changed the trajectory of my world and by the halfway through the four days. So within two days, I had made the decision to leave this career that I was successful in to dedicate my life to doing this work to help other people. I put it in my two weeks at my at my company and my boss says, you know, what are you doing?

Oh, I'm going to go work with my dad with grief, right? He was very polite about it. But I think internally he's like, you're insane, Cole. You're going to go from the entertainment world to working with people with grief, right?

And everyone I told at Fox, who I was friends with, they thought I was insane, you know, because again, their frame of reference is you're going to go work in the most like heart breaking world ever. And you're just going to walk with people with grief from their perspective. I get it. They like, I get why they thought I was I was crazy.

But you and me know, Mike, that the whole point of this work is we get to get the phone calls like you said, which is I've tried this other thing for 20 years and I'm now set free. Thank you. And then we turn it back to them and say, no, you did all the work, you know, just thanks for showing up. And hopefully I articulated it made it safe for you.

But the truth is you did this work and you helped heal your heart, right? That's why we keep coming back to this work. That's why both of us have been decades into this work now is because we're not just walking with grivers, offering them like antiquated old models like here, maybe you're in this stage. I don't know.

Hey, you should be in the anger stage. Like, if that's all you have to offer people, I couldn't do this work for more than two weeks. If all you had to offer was companioning and walking alongside someone and just like, but no road map and no actual tools and no no pragmatic approach to helping them, I would I would have burned out of this work within three weeks, right? And I would have been asking for my old job back.

The reason I'm still here 12 years later is because day after day after day, we get to hear these stories where it's like, wow, you're involved in something that truly helps people turn their life around over and over and over again. So because I still get that, oh, man, you work in grief. That must be so tough. I'm like, yeah, it's tough all the way up until the culmination of the work.

And I get to see someone set themselves free over and over and over and over. And then I'm sign up for the next Monday. When do I start my job again? Right?

And if you want that, if you want those tools and kind of that power to help people truly come talk to us because it's not just me. It's just not it's not just Mike. It's thousands and thousands of people that have this tool that truly get to help people, not sidestep and dance around it or help someone with the discovery on this session. But then the next session, I don't know what to do.

No, it's hey, I have a high level of confidence that if you have the courage to walk through all of these actions, I'm going to lay out over the course of six weeks or eight weeks or four days, you know, I have a high level of certainty that you're going to get huge value out of this work for what your heart broken about. Again, we don't make promises. I don't like to do that. So I never say, hey, you're going to not have those feelings that came back over and over and over.

You know, I won't promise that to anyone, but we get to see that all the time after they do the work. It's such a gift, right? And that's honestly why I just as a side note as kind of a guy that came through this work in hospice, I have a tremendous amount of respect for hospice folks because you guys are so emotionally courageous. To be able to know, I know the outcome is this is going to be really sad and this person's going to die.

And I know that my next client is going to be sad and this person's going to die. And you know, the courage that it takes for hospice, honestly, I don't know if I'm built for that because I like the kind of the outcome that I get with grief or recovery, right? And some people are signing up for things where it's there's a whole different outcome that we kind of know is happening in that line of work, right? And so I just want to again shout out to all the folks that do this work that are hospice practitioners.

I have tremendous amount of respect for you. And that goes for you too, Mike. You know, take this however you want, but I know you're kind out of this world, but I can't think of a person I would I would want along. If I had a loved one who was dying, I can't think of a person I would rather have alongside them than you, Mike.

You know, I'm just a huge fan of yours. I love you. I, you know, we don't need to get into this because we still do a lot of work with Crossroads Hospice. But let me tell you, I've been trying to steal Mike for a long time because I very early on identified Mike as just this incredible human being that is hyper talented at probably anything he wants to do, but I saw how talented he was with grief or recovery.

You know, again, I have heroes in grief or recovery. I have people that have been doing this work longer than I came about, right? And I'm getting an interview them for this podcast, which I'm excited about is and Mike's one of those guys, you know, I don't know. I would say Mike's probably top five in terms of the most groups probably led with grief or recovery.

I don't know that to be a fact, but, you know, the amount of experience you have actually working with griebers in the trenches with this method over the course of, you know, 15 years. I mean, you've helped a lot of people. So I want to say thank you on behalf of my father and Russell and all that, all the guys that and Gals that came before me Nancy Martin. I just want to say thank you for all the people that you have literally led through grief or recovery in the trenches with.

So in closing, is there anything else you want to cover? I know we're kind of at that hour mark. What else? Where do you want to go?

We still got a little bit of time. Yeah. So first of all, thanks. I appreciate you saying what you did.

It's a very kind of you to say. And so I appreciate you and I really enjoy, you know, obviously the work I'm doing and working with you, you know, on a daily basis too. So I think that's fantastic. You mentioned all the people I've worked with.

It's really interesting. I got was I got on a zoom with your dad at the last trying to think was maybe that it was probably the 2019 Columbus grief recovery conference. I can't remember. And I got on there and was just, you know, talking with your dad a little bit, you know, just touching base with him.

And I was telling him about all the work I had done. And he was just, he just was shaking his head. He's just like, he goes, I'm so appreciative of what was created here. And for people like you who've just taken this and just pushed this out.

And he's like, in essence, I've been able to reach out through you to help all these people. Do you know what I'm saying? And it's like, that was never my, this is never my goal. But he's like to watch the butterfly effect.

So to speak, I don't think he used those words. But to watch the effect of each person who gets trained or certified who goes out and then helps that next person and that next person and that next person and that next person and then some of those people end up getting trained and they're going helping their communities and whatever it is. I just remember your dad, you know, saying that and I was really touched, you know, by his kind of humility and humbleness and recognition and awe at hearing that. Do you know what I'm saying?

It was really kind of a beautiful, beautiful exchange that I had with him. So yeah. Yeah. Now thank you for sharing that.

I love hearing all these stories about my dad and what he did. And I wasn't even aware of it. You know, I wasn't aware of that story. And I just want to close with this.

You know, there are people that constantly want to reinvent the wheel. They want to write a book, right? For whatever reason. And so they write a book about grief.

I can't tell you how many new books about grief come out every year. And almost none of them reference the grief recovery method. Now almost none of them reference the grief recovery handbook. They'll reference a bunch of other books.

They'll reference the five stages of grief and a bunch of old antiquated stuff that was never designed for grief in the first place. They won't mention this method. Okay. And after 12 years, kind of really trying to figure this out because the question on whether this method works or not has long been answered.

We've helped over a million people were evidence-based where no one else is. This tool helps people. Now whether other people in the grief space want to share this tool with their clients, that's that's up to them. But if you're listening to this, look into the tools that are already there.

Look into this tool instead of trying to reinvent the wheel or create some new program or some new pathway, right? There's a lot of trial and error in that. And that's not great when you have people's hearts in your hands, right? It's probably better to just start with a tool that's been time-tested, that's been proven.

You know, and one of my passions on this podcast is just to show you over and over and over and over people that are like, I've never seen anything like this, both for my heart and where I worked professionally. If you're listening to this and you're just looking like Mike, maybe life's kicked in the butt in the last five or 10 years. Look into this work. Maybe you're a professional and you don't even think you have any grief, but you sure know that a lot of your clients have grief.

Look into this tool, right? But the point is in the differentiator that we've kind of discussed in this is there's awareness and there's programs that will help you find awareness. Awareness does not equal recovery. Awareness does not equal having hope.

Awareness does not equal feeling complete, okay? So we need to look at completion tools for people. Otherwise, we're just kind of reaffirming the hurt in the pain in their hearts and we keep stirring it up. That's why traditional grief groups, we didn't have time to get into that, but that's why traditional grief groups can be very dangerous because they kind of reaffirm and get you set in your pain even deeper.

That's why using old antiquated methods like the five stages of grief that were designed for a completely different human emotional experience, dying can't just be flip-flopped onto grief. Grief has way, way, way too many feelings that are different per the relationship of the person you have lost, right? Full stop, period, end of story. Hopefully you've taken that away from this from today, but again, Mike, I want to thank you for being on this podcast.

I want to thank you for all the work you've done both at our institute and long before you joined us, right? Because you've helped a ton of people profoundly. So, you know, to past Mike that wanted to like, figure it out marketing maybe isn't the most fulfilling path and wanted to get into helping people and then earned it. Masters that get in help people and then jump and write in the trenches, help people with dying and then with grief or recovery.

The world is truly a better place with you in it and I want to thank you, again, on behalf of all the people you helped, that my father won't get to meet, I won't get to meet. So thank you and I hope everyone, all you out there, thank you for listening. Make sure you like and subscribe to this podcast. We're trying to do a new episode every week and let us know what else you want to hear on this podcast.

Anything that you want to talk about in the comments section below this podcast, feel free to do that. We do jump in there and we do talk to people and answer any questions you have. And again, if you want to get in touch with Mike, I know his email address. So just reach out if you want to get in touch with Mike, if you have any questions for Mike.

But again, thanks Mike. I hope you have a great day and we'll catch you on the next one everybody. Thanks for having me, Cole.