Have You Lost Children? Guest Adrienne Mejias, LMFT Tells Her Story of Losing Her 2 Kids

I've been trying to not drink coffee and I've been pretty good about it for like several weeks, but I, I was feeling really flat before our call. And I said, you know what, a little green tea won't hurt and I am flying high right now. So I'm going to just slow me down if you need to because this is me on caffeine. Anyway, there you go.

Okay, cool. So we're about there. Awesome. So let's do this again.

I really want you to talk. I want this conversation ago where you want it to go. But if you don't mind, can you, can you let us know a little bit? I always like to start here in terms of how did you find your way to learning about the grief recovery method and kind of what what we do.

Okay, so I was a therapist before I became a grief recovery method specialist. And really what happened, it's interesting. I was a therapist first and then my husband and I became involved in a ministry, a church ministry that helped parents who were grieving the loss of a child through that ministry. And through counseling individuals, I realized that to help people who were grieving, I just needed more than what I had.

I found myself so many times in a therapy session where there was someone who was you just so broken hearted in front of me. I didn't know what to say. I had compassion, had empathy. You know, there were a few words that I could say, I'm so sorry.

And the things that I would often say, if this is fresh, you've got to give yourself time, you know, the dreaded time thing that we say. I didn't know what else to do. I just felt so stuck. So through the ministry, I started to ask more about like, gosh, I wish there was more training and grief and there weren't specific programs or there wasn't a course I could take just for, you know, for grief.

So one of my friends actually told me about the method. So I got into that this was in 2019. I got, I googled it. We were sitting at at Starbucks having coffee and I googled it.

And I was like, oh, I've never even heard of this. This is so interesting. I started to look at the training dates and there was a training in that Rouge, which is about an hour from where I am with it was like in two months. So I said, oh, my gosh, this is like the timing.

This is so incredible. So I signed up right away. And I was like, oh, my gosh, four days. Wow.

But in my mind, because I've done CEUs and, you know, this continuing education stuff of attended conferences, I'm imagining sitting there like in kind of a classroom style, taking notes, listening, getting all these tools and pointers to help people. I didn't when I got there. I know I know where this is going. I know where this is going.

I'm walking there. There were four other women. There's Ed. Now, like, oh, okay.

And he quickly, you know, told me that part of the training was to actually go through the method. And I was like, oh, I don't know that I signed up for this. Right. I knew all of the grief that I had been carrying for years from my early 20s.

So I was like, I thought I was just coming to find out how to help other people not realizing what I was going to be doing for myself. Wow. It was so, yeah, you're in the training and Ed's telling you, okay, here's kind of the agenda for the weekend. And you're like, whoa, time out.

I'm the professional here. I'm helping other people. I'm here for tools that help other people. And so you get that news.

I am. So let's, if you're, if you're okay with it, right, let's, let's kind of pause there in your journey with the training and get into maybe let's go step back a little bit because you mentioned that you're in the, in the, you were doing a ministry to help people with the loss of a child and stuff like that. And if you're okay with it, let's go to what work did you end up working on the personal work that you were describing in the certification. What, what work did you end up doing?

What, you know, loss brought you here now that you know, okay, we're going to do it on. Yes. And funny enough, it was other people's losses that I thought were bringing me there. And then when I found out too that I was going to be going through this, this whole personal journey for myself.

I mean, I immediately knew that the work that needed to be done was on the loss of my children that I mean, I was 22 and I'm 42 now. So we're talking, you know, this was almost 20 years prior losses that I had faced that, you know, I handled the way most people did. You just kind of have to go through life. We would kind of retell my husband and I would retell our story.

That was part of the ministry that we were doing. We would retell our story. That that was about it. We were just sharing a story.

We were rehashing pain. Sure. Wow. And I want to be careful here as we always do on this podcast because, you know, this podcast isn't the, hey, let's, let's beat ourselves up for things we didn't know when we didn't know them.

Right. And so a lot of the time we get really good people, we get therapists that are like, you know what, I love helping people. I'm good at helping people. And I care so much that when I identify a little hole in my game in terms of when we, when we were into the topic of grief, I feel like I could be doing more for my clients.

Right. And so they seek us out. Same with this is, and this applies for people who have a loss and then they want to get into that field and help other people with loss. Right.

I mean, that's a courageous, well intention thing. So we're not trying to beat people up that are, that are doing that because that's such an important thing too. But a lot of the time what happens is if we don't know what we're doing in those places, we just can't offer them all that, that maybe we could. Right.

And so I think that's probably where our conversation is going to go just because I know some of your story. But you're out there and you're wanting to help other grieving people, right. And I don't want to go past what you mentioned because you mentioned you lost children, right plural. And I can't even imagine what that was like for you and your husband.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the details of what happened. Yes. So we were very young when we got married. We were 20 years old.

And it was about a year into our marriage that I found I learned that I was pregnant. I was still in college. You know, at the time I was, I was upset that well timing. I'm supposed to be graduating.

I'm going to have the baby thinking, you know, I was going to have to put off graduating from college for a little bit. The pregnancy was wonderful. We lived in a very small town near my parents. And life was just very simple.

That time, they really weren't cell phones or anything like that. It was just a very, very quiet, simple life. And so this pregnancy was wonderful. And then when I had go into the hospital, I had to be induced.

So go into the hospital. Once again, everything was fine as far as we knew. And when Emma was born, she was my first born. And I learned immediately that there were many issues.

There were physical abnormalities that were noticed. There were there were just a lot of issues that we didn't even recognize at the time because they whisked her away and you know brought her into the NICU. I didn't get to see her for hours after she was born. And the first word we even heard from anyone was, was the NICU doctor coming in to tell us that there was something wrong.

They didn't know what it was. And they went, like they just read off this laundry list of all of the issues they saw with her. This was before I even laid eyes on her. And this was after a 20 hour delivery.

So it was incredible. When we finally got to meet her, I mean, we were, we felt so excited, blessed, terrified all at the same time. And we didn't realize it, but it would be a few weeks before we would even have answers. They were doing all of this testing.

And at the time it seemed that Emma's biggest issues revolved around her intestines feeding, feeding issues, GI issues. So that was our primary concern at the time. And then we found the diagnosis a few weeks later, we found out that she had, it's, it's called Smith Limley Opens. And it's a syndrome where she did not produce cholesterol, basically.

Emma has been a night each carry a recessive Dean for this syndrome. So that means that we have a 25% chance of having a child with this for each pregnancy. You know, so 75% chance of having a healthy child. So when we found that out and we knew that she needed more care than what we could give her at the hospital, the local hospital, we moved her to New Orleans to Children's Hospital, New Orleans.

And that was a few hours away from home. I moved to New Orleans. My husband, he moved out of our little home. He moved in with my parents.

And he was working hours away from New Orleans. So he had to stay home, medical insurance, everything, you know, he could not leave his job. So I was living at the Ronald McDonald House in New Orleans. And he was living with my parents over two hours away.

And he had to come on weekends. And this whole time, there's, you know, doctors that are trying to help her with her very complicated situation. So we were in New Orleans for nine months straight. And we decided to, we needed more help.

So we decided to go to Johns Hopkins. At that point, my husband was able to kind of take a leave from work. He found a job up there, which was incredible. And we lived at the Ronald McDonald House in Baltimore.

And we were there for about six months. And by this point, Emma is already like a year and a half old, having never left the hospital. There were complications after complications. She had a trache.

She had a feeding tube. She had so too many surgeries to count. And then of course, in a hospital and with all of these different lines and there were infections. And it was, it was almost as though I was like this nightmare that we just couldn't wake up from.

One day was good. There were three days of bad. That followed was one step forward. So many steps back.

The amount of times we were told that she was going to die or that we needed to let her go. I mean, it was, it was countless. And then in the meantime, I find out I'm pregnant for our second child. I was terrified.

My parents are in Louisiana at this point. We're in Baltimore. To add insult to injury. My dad had a massive heart attack.

So we were trying to navigate through. My dad was only 48 at the time. He survived. And I just want to, I want to remind the audience, you're 22, 23 years old, right, dealing with all of this.

Wow, I cannot even imagine. And what's so incredible, I look at the woman I am now and the woman I was then. And I guess you know, as our brains fully develop and we tend to worry more as we get older and we know more about all the scary things that can happen. I don't even know.

I don't think I could handle things as well as I did back then. I think because I just had no choice but to go and go and do and it was, there was no processing any of it. We had to make big decisions that you couldn't talk about for, you know, a day or two. Let's figure this out.

What are we going to do? We just had to act. Yeah. And so we were dealing with a very sick baby and finding out we're pregnant for a second child.

We heard a lot of negative things from the medical field, from family, about having a second child. And so it was that we, this was, that we were trying, obviously, but we just, we got a lot of opinions about what we should have done, what we needed to do, what we should not be doing decisions, we shouldn't be making. So it was very easy for us to want to isolate. Even from family, because we just didn't have, we didn't have room for that kind of negativity on top of everything we were dealing with.

Right. And then I was about eight weeks, no, about 14 weeks pregnant when we learned that our second baby was also going to have the same syndrome. Her situation was going to be a little bit more complicated, as if Emma wasn't so complicated. She also had a heart defect.

And the way this syndrome is, it's, there's a spectrum of, of issues that you can have. Very complicated issues. Some cases are very mild, but some are very, very serious. And our cases happen to be more serious.

So found out that, that our second baby, a little girl, Anna was also going to have the same syndrome, but with more complexities, I guess. And at that point, we decided that the best thing for us was to come back to Louisiana, because we did need some support. And when we moved Emma back, we were coming from one of the best hospitals, you know, in the country, Johns Hopkins, where there's a specialist for everything, even to, to, you know, start an IV. And we knew who knows exactly what they're doing, to a very small hospital in Louisiana.

And things just went down so incredibly fast. And the regret, and all of the, why did we leave, why didn't we, you know, can we try to go back, we tried to go back to Johns Hopkins for her sake. And we, we couldn't, insurance wouldn't even pay for us to return. So we had to make the best decisions we could with what we had, and we decided to try to go back to New Orleans.

Where I delivered Anna, she was, she was a few weeks premature. I had to have an emergency section, because of her heart issue. And Emma at that time was a few miles down the road at a different hospital. We had our two babies in two different hospitals.

And as soon as I could, I was trying to go between both places. Yeah. Having had major surgery, you know. And this was, this puts us in 2004.

Emma was born in 2003. And so we're at, in October of 2004, when Anna was born. And after she was born, I mean, they were, once again, tending to all of her issues. And we knew she was going to need heart surgery.

And unfortunately, she had this blood disorder, this bleeding disorder that would not allow her to have surgery. So, and once again, I look back at this and you've watched movies where you're like, what else can happen? What are you, are you here? You know, the characters and the actors and the movie saying, what more could happen?

At that, at one point I was thinking, I remember looking up and God like, what do you want from us? What more can we give? What can we do? We're pulled in so many directions.

You've given us these children to care for. Our hands are so tied in so many ways with what we can do. Yeah. Yeah.

So as Anna, a mother to past with her. Emma got incredibly sick. She had a really bad infection. And so we're nearing the end of 2004.

And it was actually in Christmas Eve of 2004 that Emma died. The, the motions that we felt. I think anger was, was a big part of like, my gosh, we did all of these things. What more could we have done?

But also there was relief in that herd journey of all of the suffering that she had gone through. Had come to an end. This was nothing I would have ever said back then that I felt relieved because of what she had gone through. Yeah, you know, and I just want to say this.

First of all, we've never met Adrian in person. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do it. It's times like this when I hate zoom and you know, or whatever we're on right now, because I would offer you a hug. I don't know what else to say right now, other than when you take a hug.

And you could tell me no, but that's what my heart tells me right now. It's like, I just, I want to give you a hug. And I can't imagine what it was like for you and your husband. So far in this, in this journey.

And I know you know this, but our audience may not know this. And I'm sure that you're going to be able to do it today. This was all created by my father, whose baby son died in the hospital and never came home for him to find some tools to help heal his heart. And then turn that into a book to help other people.

And then at some point down the road years decades later, right, you lose a baby that never got to come home from the hospital. Right. It's just I'm getting chills just thinking about like the power of how things work. Right.

So I just wanted to mention that we talk about what you're mentioning, which is the definition of grief is conflicting feelings in the change in or end of a familiar pattern of behavior. Right. Now, we never introduced this to the grieving person directly because like you said, they may or may not be ready to look at that to admit that or do any of those things. So of course, we don't want to put them in a position to have to do any of those things.

The reason I mentioned all this is because my dad said something almost exactly verbatim of what you said, he said, you know, if you were to ask me originally whether I was relieved or not, you know, around the death of my son, I would have punched you in the mouth. Right. But later on, he was willing to admit that there were some conflicting feelings. There was a sense of relief, right.

And this is very normal and natural for griebers. And we just want to put that out there because we want because if we don't put that information out there, then people think something's wrong with them. Absolutely. Right.

Like when my dad died of cancer a couple years back, and he had been battling for months and it was this nightmare that we couldn't wake up from. My mom and my sister and me trying to be his caretakers in the home for months and months and months, seeing the stuff he was going through. When I walked through that door at 2 a.m. Right.

And I knew just I just knew by looking at him next to my mom that the life had left him and he had died at some point that night. I had a lot of relief for him, for our family. Right. And it's again, it's important for us to be able to talk about this openly to each other.

Otherwise, we think, oh my god, no one knows how that weekend. I can't say that. Something's wrong with me. And then we have to go underground with our grief.

Right. So I just want to I just want to thank you for being that courageous to be able to say that. Right. That's the truth for us when we have these kind of kind of situations, these losses is like there are conflicting feelings and some of them feel very normal.

Like anger or I can't believe this happened or you know, all those kind of things and then sometimes we also have relief and that's okay too. So I just want our listeners to hear that from Adrian from me from my father way back when he lost a boy that never his, his son, who would have been my older brother, his lungs didn't develop. Right. And that was kind of what was going on there.

But anyway, I want to, I want to please continue Adrian just kind of with the story. But again, I just want to offer you a hug because I heard that, you know, and I've never heard your story in details by the way. I've not heard this story specifically. So it's breaking my heart, you know, and again, that's why I want to give you a hug.

But you know, aside from that, your babies are in two different hospitals. Right. And so your husband, I'm assuming your husband and some of your family is supporting one baby, you're supporting another baby into different hospitals. So I mean, even that I can't imagine.

Yes. And it was being at one hospital, calling the other hospital, figuring out because at one point, at one point because Emma was declining so rapidly. And, but then Anna was doing so poorly as well and needing to have heart surgery. It was, it was like which one is worse off at this moment that I need to be there.

That was how we were gauging it. It's like which one is, wow, is worse. It's, it was a very, so overwhelming. It was so exhausting.

And then, you know, mentioning to what you said about me being able to say that I was relieved that freedom only came from the method. I wouldn't have even said this in November of 2019 before I went through the train. I really wouldn't have because, you know, oh my gosh, what kind of mother would feel relief. You know that her daughter died after 20, 20 months of being in a hospital.

Something that I carried and then felt so bad about feeling. And then it was only, it was only two weeks later that we lost Anna. So it was Christmas Eve of 2004 in January 6th of 2005. We had two funerals within two weeks.

Again, there are times I don't have words, you know, I just don't know what to say at this point other than. I'd give you hug right now. I appreciate that. Thank you.

I cannot imagine we have four children. We've had ups and downs at the different births of the children. You know, we've had up, but, but to be 22 years old, 23 years old and navigating what you know what you just told us you've navigated. I just, it's truly just heartbreaking.

And going back to something you just said and for the viewers, I don't want you to miss this point. Adrian and her husband are dealing with this in their 20s. Okay. And she and she doesn't not come to the grief recovery method for about 20 years, you said, right?

Yeah, I'm just going to give you 16 something like that. 15 2019. Yeah, don't make me do math. Even caffeine can help me. It's 20 years.

Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, let's say 15 years, right? But 15 years, you're out there.

And again, we'll get to this in a second. I'm sure, but like you're out there doing a ministry to help other people with child loss specifically. I think you were saying. And you're out there helping people.

But we're still holding these things for 15 years. Again, this is nothing about you. This is about tools being available or tools not being available information being available or not being available. And that's, you know, honestly, what why our whole passion to do this podcast to do YouTube and to do blogs just to get more information out there.

So that hopefully right Adrian, someone is watching this. And they don't have to hold that for 15 years. They can just find one of us and say, you know what? I wouldn't say this to an audience right now.

But yeah, I was relieved when my dad died. I was relieved when my child died. Don't mistake that for me wanting it to happen or being okay with any of that. But there were some feelings there.

And that way we can relate to each other, right? And that's a, that's a great piece of it. So I'm sure we'll get into other stuff. But please continue.

So you got to, you got to bury two of your baby girls within weeks of each other. I want to stay here, Adrian, if you're okay with it because again, some people that are listening to this, they're there. They're, they're not ready for grief recovery. They're not ready for new tools.

They're just there in their grief, right? So I want to be able to share with them the ups, the downs, the highs, the lows in kind of your journey after the death of your girls, you and your husband looking to put your, you guys back together. Like, and again, where did that start? Was that months and months later, you know, where you just still in like survival mode of like making choices and not have like compartmentalizing everything, not being able to go to the level.

I mean, we can go anywhere you want again, because you've opened your heart so courageously and you're going to help a lot of people with this. So we go wherever you want, but where I'm, I'm kind of curious is the things that you did as a griever following those losses that were helpful. The things that you tried that were not helpful, you know, again, if we can help people who are in marriages after the loss of a child, right? And people argue this all day long, I don't want to get into it.

But for a lot of people, the loss of a child can really destroy a marriage, right? I know that happened with with with my father and his wife at the time. Again, we can go wherever you want, but if you can just tell us a little bit about your journey after your girls died and kind of where you guys went from there, the journey of two grievers that are young in their 20s. And I mean, I, you know, where do you go after that?

Right. Well, and get because our first year of marriage was really the only time that we had together before we were pretty much separated and then living in this kind of fight or flight mode. Wow. And even that first, you know, or instead of dealing with the typical things that young couples have to figure out, you know, about life and.

And just all of those things we were trying to figure out like, okay, so what are, what are we going to do with our children, where are we going to go? Now we find out that there's, you know, a possibility that every pregnancy can result in this. We always imagined having a very large family. I was the baby at four.

I wanted you four, six children, which was part of why we were, we were very happy, although it wasn't in our plan to get pregnant within the first year marriage. And we were also happy because we knew we wanted a big family. So we were right. And there were our hopes and dreams about what our future would look like, what our family would look like.

You know, lots of children. And right after everything happened, I think it's, it's, it's so normal to just go with what the world, where the world leads you. It's like, okay, well, no, you have, you have to, you have bills to pay. I mean, now you don't, you're not living in the hospital, Adrian, what are you going to do with your life?

You need to finish college. So I was able to finish college. But then I also decided, oh my gosh, I think I know exactly what I need to do. I need to become a nurse.

I've been living in a hospital for so long. Am I a nurse? Oh no. You introduced me.

So these are the things. So let me do this. Let me do this. Let me keep so busy and figure out what can I do?

I want to be in a hospital helping other families with, you know, sick children. And so I was started nursing school. We're living in New Orleans, which we decided to stay in New Orleans. Remember, it's a few hours from our family.

We decided to stay in New Orleans because we had literally just moved right before both girls died. So we said, okay, for whatever reason, we're here. We have at least, you know, we're, we'll just stay here. We'll have time.

The two of us to figure what we're going to do next. And thank Katrina happened. I know way, I know way you added that part in 2005. Katrina.

So where in New Orleans? I guess the dates work out. We're new words and we had to evacuate. But this is what I love about.

I feel like God since a humor. He knows sometimes when he's trying to guide you down a certain road and you're just like, no, I'm going to do what I want. And he will put you there. So he's like, okay, you know, I think maybe I should go home.

We're like, I know, we'll just hang around New Orleans. Okay, well, here's Katrina. And there was nursing school. I had just started nursing school in New Orleans too.

So we come back to Lafayette. So, you know, Lafayette was spared from the storm. And I was, I was diving into nursing school. And I find out I'm pregnant for baby number three.

And once again, this, the immediate reaction was like, I do not want anyone to know this. What is everyone going to think? What if something's wrong? How irresponsible we look as a couple.

And as luck would have it, baby number three also had the syndrome. At this point, once again, it was almost like our each child things were more severe. And so for our third baby, which we know was a girl, we named her Hannah. I actually miscarried at 19 weeks because she was so there were so so many issues with her.

We really thought, okay, well, God's trying to tell us that we're not meant to have children. And those were also things that were being said to us from from loving family members, even. And sorry, Adrian, I just want to stay on that that lost for a second because before I got married and before we started having children, I was not aware of how many women have miscarriages. And through maturing and becoming an adult and hearing from Ashley and her, consoling friends, right, I really saw in my kind of late 20s, 30s, wow, like a lot of women lose babies to miscarriage.

And so I just want to say again to women who are out there in the audience, I know just because I've watched it so many women miscarry. And they don't do any work, emotional work around that. I just wish I hope right that we can make such an impact in this world that women understand that there is work available to them to to grieve and to heal these miscarriages because these these are devastating losses for these women. You know, I've seen it.

And the good news is for me, we do have friends that have gone through this process, this method of grief recovery work around that loss. And then I know a lot of women who don't and they kind of move forward and them and their partner, you know, continue to work on the pregnancy. But there are so many of us that have lost a child, you know, in the womb. And it is absolutely work that that affects us negatively emotionally and work that we can do.

So I just wanted to stop there for a moment and not pass that that. And again, I'm not saying you did this, but it's like, I think in society, we would we would minimize that loss versus an an Emma, right. And it's like, no, you named her. That was Hannah, right.

And it's like, these are heart breaks in our life in our world. Right. And there's work we can do. So we don't just haul that herd around for us for the rest of our lives.

Right. So anyway, please continue. I just wanted to point that out. You make such a great point.

And it's, I've, I have done, I've helped women who have miscarried. And some of what I hear them say immediately is well, but I, but I didn't go through what you went through well, but my child, right. I was only so many weeks pregnant. I what and it's, it's dismissing their, their own grief and losses.

And for a while, I struggled with, with telling anyone what I went through because I don't ever want someone to feel as though, you know, what we went through in the hospital, it's different. It's, it's not, it's nothing more than different. It is different. And just like my husband, I, we are so incredibly happy that we have two healthy children.

I have a 14 year old son and an 11 year old daughter. So number four and five were healthy. And even the losses that we experienced with Emma, with Anna and with Hannah, we can't wrap our minds around what it would be like if one of our healthy children, if something happened to them now. No, so it's such a, it's such a, I say dangerous thing, but to compare, well, my grief versus your grief.

And I always tell people like, don't, don't get fixated on what I've gone through. And it, and it is hard to share my story with my clients because it is, like I said, kind of this movie like, oh my gosh, you really went through all of that. And when my clients, I don't want it to be about me or what I've gone through because then I noticed they immediately try to like, oh gosh, well, what I want to do, there's nothing compared to, I don't, I don't want you to do that because your losses are 100% felt and experienced by you the same way as mine were. I just want to say that, and I may get in trouble for saying this, but, you'll see in a second.

I have found that in terms of the hierarchy of losses that society places, right, is they, you know, society is going to say that the worst loss you could ever have is losing the loss of a child. Right. And then, unfortunately, right, Adrian, you have the trump card of that and you say, well, I've lost three children, right. And then Adrian only gets to feel sad for a second, but you know what we're going to do, Adrian, we're going to go find you someone who's lost five children, right.

Right. And then after that, we can't even have that person grieve and hurt because we're going to find someone that lost seven children plus a limb, plus their wife, right. Right. Right.

And, and when we have to get away from this thinking, right, is we have to get away from this pecking order of grief. There's no ranking system. There's no NFL draft for how many losses you've had and therefore other people can't play in the game. The fact of the matter is based on our life experience, right.

We all have hearts that are smashed into a thousand pieces over the losses we've endured, right. And the reason I know that Adrian has done her work to to heal her heart. Now again, he I'm not saying that she doesn't have sad days or you know again, Adrian can tell us about the reality of what it's like to have had these losses from her past. But even that you're proposing that you don't want other people minimizing you don't want people, you know, saying I can't do any work because your loss is so great.

That's how I know you've done the work. In the comments of this podcast, if when I put it on YouTube, there are going to be people who haven't found the work that has helped them that maybe have lost a child. And me even proposing that other people can do work around other grief, they will in the comments say, how dare you propose that other people can do grief work. This is the worst loss ever and really it nothing else really matters, right.

No other work matters because of this loss and that breaks my heart. Okay. I don't want that for people, but I also can't keep quiet about these things because I've been doing this now across the world for 12 years. And so I want to challenge people who that have lost a child to look into this work because I have found that there's kind of two camps here when it comes to the loss of a child.

You have a camp where that loss and that grief turns into that person or that couple's identity and they're going to year after year tell the story and that is going to be their new identity in their life is my name is so and so and I'm the person that lost this child two years ago or 17 years ago or 23 years ago. Okay. And I don't want that for people. I've also worked with adult children who want to come and grieve and complete their relationship with the living parent who after the loss of their sibling was never there for as a parent for them for the rest of their lives.

Right. So these are the things that are at stake. If we don't openly talk about different options that people with the loss of a child in this case have other options that that they have other tools that they can apply to heal from these unimaginable things. Okay.

In no way am I trying to minimize that loss. But again, the idea that we have to have a ranking system and loss really does like you said if there's 12 people in a room, there's only one person that gets to actually do any work because the other 11 of us have to minimize our losses. Okay. We can't even look at them because this person is the worst don't you know right it's like the first time I went to this grief recovery the training you did in 2019 right.

The first time I did it I was 18 years old in Florida and I remember my dad just saying, cool, I got you a plane ticket and you're going to get certified in the group recovery method. And by the way, I'm not the most mature 18 year old, I can promise you this, you know, but my dad loved me and he just wanted me to have this experience. So I get there. And I'm with like 12 people and they're all adults and they all have what I perceive to be big losses real losses.

I'm 18. What do I know right. And thank God that this method is so gentle and so loving and so welcome in that all the you know what all those adults did they put their arm around me. And they honored my heartbreak and we got into the work and guess what I had plenty of heartbreak at 18 maybe it wasn't the same as their heartbreak but no no one wanted to say, oh, you know what come back kid when you have some real grief.

Right. I found some stuff I needed to heal from and I'm glad I did right I've used those tools for for a lot of my life. So anyway, I just want to again say thank you for being aware that when you talk about your losses that are very significant losses, no one would deny that that we're not wanting that to be okay now you guys just minimize your own thing right you're honoring hey no you your heart was broken to 1000 pieces just like mine was right and there's enough room in this world for us to both do work and to support each other right and and and a lot of the time people don't get that when we say well, do you do you group people by lost you all have to have the same loss to be in the same group. How could you have a widow next to a divorce see and we just say just just show up and what what kind of show you how that all goes right and you know by week two or three they're crying together they're hugging each other.

We've all identified are all of our hearts are in a thousand pieces and there's enough room for us all to do the work sit next to each other. Absolutely right and you know and I wanted to have you on because I find that the people that have the hardest time believing what I'm saying right now are people who have lost a child okay but I'll tell you that in one out of every three groups I've had I have there's 1215 people in a room and there's a couple of people that lost a child. And there's a couple of people that had a divorce and there's a couple of people that lost a spouse to death and there's a and there's one person that's working on the loss of a pet and there's a person that's working on a bankruptcy and then there's another person over here that's working on the loss of health or their spouse has Alzheimer's there's another person over here working on a living dad that never showed up to them like a dad should have.

And they've been heartbroken ever their whole life and grieving that relationship their whole life okay and until they found our stuff they didn't even look at that as grief and no one else would help. Okay and all 12 or 15 of those people can do powerful work and all 12 and 15 of those people can support each other once we get past the nonsense that's put out there in society which is my case is different you can't recover from my case. Oh, I just found someone with what looks like a worst case than me now I got a really not even work on my case right and and that stuff has to go right and I'll I'll go to my grave saying these kinds of things and I'm fine taking some heat over it because you know sometimes these opinions aren't popular but I know them to be true so I got kind of got a I got to say it and this is probably at this point the caffeine talking so let me turn it back over to you Adrian.

I want to hear from you 100% correct and I'm thinking to I see I see a lot of children to and in fact I was our priest would do like he would have talks for parents to attend if their children were in you know in the religious formation classes and he wanted a therapist to address any topics that we thought parents might need to know or you know or address with them for. These little meetings and one of the therapists got sick right before and he was like hey Adrian would you like to talk to all of these parents and I was like oh my god it was like a few days before and so I said yeah sure and I said well what do you want me to talk about and he's like whatever you think parents you know whatever would be important and I immediately knew that I wanted to talk to all of the parents about grief in their children and the first question that asked and it was a true story.

I asked and it was a church full of parents because they had to be there you know but I asked them you know raise your hand if you believe your children have grieved any losses and there were I could maybe three or four hands came up and when asked you know okay what what did your job go through it was like well you know parents died there I don't even think any of them identified a pet loss as loss for a child and so but it was like grandparents and then there were a few parents who were divorced so I went into all of the ways that kids grieve and you can see the look on all of these parents face these are not things that they would have known they were so incredibly thankful and grateful that I brought this information to them but they I mean they they truly did not recognize all of the changes that children go through little things that they might think are so insignificant today your friend didn't want to talk to you at school or you know bullied all the ways all the way especially with social media now and all the things that kids have to face so it was it's incredible just how unaware our world is when it comes to what grief is amen you're speaking of the choir here yeah and and it is it's one of those things where it's like you said and I think we should real quick just list out a couple of other options so people understand like I say this in my trainings quite a bit again grief is about the conflicting feelings caused by the change in or and of a familiar pattern behavior so let's say that I'm a high school kid and I went to school with all of these kids for my whole life kindergarten and now we graduate 12th grade right and don't you know I got the partial college scholarship for baseball and everyone my peer group parents and my friends they all want to say we're so proud of you were so excited for you you know you're getting started you got your whole life ahead of you well what am I doing in that instance I am grieving I am grieving a tremendous change in what is from familiar to me but how confusing is it for that 17 year old kid because no one's mentioning that at all all we're doing is mentioning the positive and the excitement for the future and we're not talking about what I lose by moving to that next step right there's a tremendous amount of fear there so that night on graduation night what do I do to cover those feelings that are in me I drink a little bit more than I usually do at those parties and then I get my pickup truck and then I wrap it around a tree you know maybe it was me in that car maybe it was for four of my friends in that car but when we say that unresolved grief like destroys lives you and I could tell a million stories like that where listeners would never have correlated graduation night for high school kids to a major grieving experience where they have to go and numb that pain in a way that normally they wouldn't have to at that level and that causes accidents right this happens with domestic violence this happens with suicide this happens with you know the list goes on on what grief does to us as a society on a daily basis at any age level yet it is never given credit for what it does and it's and again that's you know that's why we you and me and all the people that do this work that's why we're passionate about getting the word out there because we're trying to scream from the rooftops from the mountains that like guys we can call it trauma this decade and we can call it anxiety and stress the last decade and we can call it all of these other things but for whatever reason we are terrified to call it grief and there are mountains of grief in every one of us and we go to numb that pain right and and it doesn't have to be that way right and that's why why we're really doing so anyway keep going Adrian please I love this part of your story so you're you know you're you're telling this whole room full of parents hey here's some other grief events that your kids probably have where they started with maybe two of them in the room thinking their kids have had grief experiences and now they're probably all figuring out that every every kid they have qualifies yeah and and I mean even after they they said oh my gosh like thank you so much because you know we're going to do things different with our kids we're not going to tell them like oh my gosh don't think about that you're 13 who cares about that or ignore them who are they to you or you know whatever we tell our kids and we've all done it you know we we've all kind of we want to take their their pain away we don't want them to be sad so we tell them that they should but it don't don't think about that that's crazy don't that silly don't worry about that no so they and some of these parents said my gosh I would have I would pay to hear this kind of talk this this is like a lot of really important information that parents need to know and always for people to I tell them chapter three is for my favorites in in the handbook because you become so aware of all of the things that you know you're going to do it.

So I think that's the way you learn things you learned and we're told about how to handle the tough stuff that never works. Yeah and so I even tell parents if you don't even believe that there's any grief with your children just read this you'll start to understand you know how we don't even know how to handle our own stuff how can we teach our children how to handle their stuff. Yeah amen and you know part of the reason that I love that you're an LMFT is that again not talking bad about therapists or counselors I think there are a lot of them are excellent. I do think that there is a hole in their education when it comes to grief because if you were to as a parent if you were to bring your child to see a counselor about dealing with issues right there's a strong probability they will not correlate anything that kids going through with unresolved grief either right.

And that shout out to all of our thousands of counselors and therapists like you that identified we spent a half a semester in school on this topic yet a lot of people that I'm seeing have grief and I don't know how to navigate those conversations right and they they seek out our stuff. And and come get some education but you know it's the same with the kids right this just goes undetected even with mental health professionals right and that's a frustration for me is like and again we're going to get a little controversial here but it's like. What are the two main symptoms of grief unresolved grief right reduced ability at concentrate and a lack of energy well look if if I really loved Graham or grandpa or I love that dog that we've had my whole life or I just love that house and we moved or I love that town and we moved or I had a loss of trust in somebody a babysitter because they were inappropriate with me or you know or the list goes on all of those things are losses of trust their loss events their grief and we're going to have a lot of things that we can do.

They're loss events their grief and all of a sudden I've reduced ability concentrate in my grade slip right again if we missed diagnosed what's going on for that children we have no shot at treating them or giving them any kind of tools that can help and it's you know I don't think it's dramatic to say it's an epidemic that we're not reaching or helping our kids effectively because we're missing a huge piece of the puzzle on what's going on in their hearts and in their tummy and that's unresolved emotional experiences from their past. I think I even said this when I was talking with Mike in the other video clip where it's you know people will come into my office and they say you know oh I'm depressed I have I have depression they will they will diagnose themselves with depression or with anxiety or ADHD I can't focus I can't pay attention I can't and it's it's not even much unpacking to find out like.

Look at all that you have been going through yes you're sad not going to I'm not going to use the D word because depression is is not something that you just throw around you know the diagnosis so you know yes you're sad yes you're you're feel you're worried you can't sleep you're struggling on the day to day you know just accomplish anything and this is great. This is great and it's not to say that those things don't exist yes there is depression yes there is clinical depression and anxiety and there is attention deficit hyperactivity just there are those things but not everything is. Listen right right and probably 80% 90% of what I see is not those things yeah and you know and I would agree and I and I And you know I'm coming from the same place I think some I think those other things do exist.

Although you know there's yeah I mean no I I'm not quite sure about ADHD and stuff like that but again we don't need to we don't need to go through that like you said I think that there is massive massive misdiagnosis on to a to a large degree on calling it anything but grief right and and thank you for talking mentioned the D word depression I didn't say that one in my my rant right because right now I hear so much about trauma right and I'm like well what happened oh my mom died you know oh I'm sorry so like you have some grief No I have trauma because that's like the cool world word on Instagram right now is trauma right to go step further son even just trauma they will actually say PTSD like I've heard people say PTSD like yeah and you know I was all the things that all the boxes that have to be checked off for it to actually be PTSD yeah absolutely and and you know and I try and tell people because look I'm I'm still I think you were saying earlier like you you know your brain formed when you got a little bit older you know out of your 20's I'm I'm still waiting for my brain to fully form so like I just want to put that out there but I just tell people just in my my own simple kind of way it's like just know that if you're going to take on these super high-level fifteen dollar diagnoses right and these super complex things and these disorders and these pathologies just know that that really like complicates your belief system and and I'm just kind of like I'm trying to do it really really well yeah I'm trying to do it and I'm just going to do it again but I'm going to do it and just to take a great deal of the things that are very helpful. and like, you're belief that you're gonna recover from this stuff.

And then you come and meet me, Goofy old me, and I'm like, hey, maybe it's just kind of some sadness and some hurt over these hopes, dreams and expectations. And it didn't happen how we thought it was gonna happen. Or, we hoped we were gonna have this, and that didn't happen. Or, God, that must have really broke your heart when you lost that person, right?

Maybe it's grief. Maybe it's a normal and natural kind of sadness, and we don't need this super complex diagnosis. Now, if you truly have some super complex diagnosis, great, Goofy Adrian, don't see me, don't see me, right? Because I'm not qualified for any of that.

But I'll tell you what, I've had a lot of people that have come to our work and found tremendous results with just pure and simple degree for Kavi method, using simple feelings words and simple tools, and kind of moving away from the complexities that our society likes to put on mental health now, which again, I would argue we don't even do, right? If you want to do mental health, don't see me, I'm not equipped at that. I help with emotional health. I'm, you know, our method is really good at emotional health.

In fact, I'll try and get you out of your brain as much as I can when you work with me to try and get you down on your heart. Because that's where I see this work, really unlocking people from years and years of hurt is emotional work. Anyway, turning it back to you. And I would have saved, I would have spared myself a lot of grief, no pun intended, if I would have known this all those years ago.

I mean, the health problems I have from the stress, like I have, it's called Barrett's Asophagus, which is like pre-cancer in my Asophagus, and there's no doubt just all the worry, I was always physically sick, my stomach, my just, all these health problems just from all of the stress from the grief that I didn't know what to do with. And I did believe that, well, I'm not running away from it, I'm doing this work for the church. Even before we worked with couples who lost children, we were helping, we were giving talks to couples who were engaged that were going to be married in the church. And so we would talk with them.

And like I said, we were sharing our story, but that's not doing work, that's not action. Sharing a story is sharing a story. Those aren't steps to work through the pain, because we both know, my husband and I both, I mean, we found out through Ed too, that when you really start to get below the surface, and it gets to be so painful, that's when you know. Yeah, but I didn't really do any work.

Where we were just, like deeper thoughts, deeper memories, were so incredibly painful to us. But I watched your video about your feet. You know, we build, yes, we built this, really we built this wall around ourselves to protect us from hurt, but anything that gets in there, and you know, there's, there are cracks. And when it penetrates, there's a lot of stuff that's going to come out when it's been carried for so long.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, and we're, just so you know, we're going to kind of, we're going to do a two-part series here with Adrian. So appreciate this conversation and what you're bringing to this conversation. We're going to kind of stop part one here.

Okay, and then we're going to continue for those of you watching this. I want to say thank you, Adrian. I want to say thank you for just again pouring your heart out there. Because I know it's it's in because you want to help people, you know, and I just love that.

And that's, that's what I want to do too. So thank you for being here. And again, I can't wait to offer you a hug in person. Yes.

And your husband too. I look forward to meeting him too. And you know, I want to, I would love to talk to him at some point. But again, thank you.

And we will meet again soon. All right. Thank you. Thank you.