Overcoming Grief and Finding Freedom: Jocelyn Jackson Williams’ Journey of Resilience and Healing

Do you remember that? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I remember it.

And on my end, I remember because John and Russell cared so much about helping grievers. They weren't really that into the tech side of things. And you remember the old website. So I remember like my first question to you was, are you the person responsible for the new website?

Thank you. Yeah, that for yeah. Yeah, go ahead. No, no, that so that was just that was I think the same the same time.

It just meet like being really amazed at your talent and skill and really carrying the grief of every institute into a new generation, which really is all online and tech savvy and all the things. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you so much.

But it's just I just again, I reminisce. I'll never forget and again, I don't know if that was the first time we met, but that was that you really made your mark on me just watching you speak about this method, right? And for all of us around here, this is a passion. And I got to hear your passion for it.

And then, you know, shortly after that, I don't I don't know exactly when, but but I was like, Hey, I vote for Jocelyn to be our next trainer, you know, and that and that all came about to and I'm so I'm so glad that that it did. I'm sure we'll get in all of that. But where I like to start, usually Jocelyn is if you don't mind, I think it's always good for the audience to know, how did you come into the world of grief or recovery? How did you find it?

You know, if you could tell the audience a little bit about just kind of how you came to be in this world. Right. Because we all kind of say the specialists say, none of us grew up saying, I want to be a grief recovery mother specialist. We all find it, you know, as life happens.

And so for me, I was working for my church at the time. And the pastors were having a hard time with with helping grievers in terms of knowing really what to say to them. That's really that's of help. You know, they they knew how to encourage them spiritually, but emotionally.

They just didn't really, you know, a lot of the myths that we talk about, some of those were some of the things that they would, you know, would say is just to think at different thoughts or, you know, focus on the scripture, but not realizing that something needs to be addressed with them emotionally. So I got tasked with finding some sort of help and recovery for grievers. And I just Googled, I don't know, I don't remember what I originally Googled something like grief, probably like grief counselor or something like that. And I just started calling people that popped up when I when I saw that and the first five people, all five people said they were trained at the grief recovery institute.

So I was like, okay, that that's my sign. I'm going to just reach out to them and and Russell answered the phone. And Russell talked to me for I think about 45 minutes. And there was not a second of that call that felt like a sales call of him trying to sell the method or just have me feel like I had to do this because it's, you know, like it was the only thing out there, even though it is the best thing out there.

He just really, he spent the time just learning about me and finding out like what my unresolved grief was and just being a sound, being a space of support. And so I just ended that call thinking this is absolutely where I need to be. And I did it thinking I'm going to bring it back to to my church so we can have this support. And then, you know, just has, you know, snowballs since then and to me starting to, we actually, we first offered it to people at the church and then people in the community started to hear about it.

So then people who didn't even go to our church were coming to. And then that's somewhere along the lines. I think one of my coworkers said, maybe this is something you should be just doing. And I'm like, yeah, I think so.

And as I started offering it out to the community as well and just kind of expanded from there. And it was right around that time too that I met you. And Russell had told me, yeah, we're, we're needing a new trainer. We know we got a few things in the pipeline.

And I think you're the ones who stood up and it's like, no, I think this should be, should be jostling. So, so thank you. Cause I think you moved me up into Q from, from where Russell had me. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. No, I'm glad, I'm glad I could be a part of that for sure. So let me ask you this. In terms of, I always find it interesting because a lot of the time insertifications that I'm doing or you're doing, you know, we do have people initially there because they're there to bring this to their organization or they're professional and they're looking for tools to help others.

Right. And as you know, we really are big on personal work first, right? We'll give you the tools for you to utilize them professionally for sure. But really, we all have to remember, we all have unresolved grief.

So can you talk a little bit about the personal work that you did early on in your kind of a career as a specialist? Just the stuff that you did and kind of what that meant to you and and and all that stuff. When people come to get certified, some know and some don't know that you're going to do personal work and but you only work on one relationship. Right.

So pretty soon after the certification, we were planning on me starting to offer grief recovery at church. And I knew I had only done one relationship. So I started to just do as many as possible. I wrote I did about 10.

I graft about 10 because I wanted to feel as complete as possible. I graft about 10 people. Sandy was in my, we were in the same training, certification training. So I called up Sandy.

I was like, Hey, do you mind being a heart with ears for an hour or two? It's like I have to go through quite a, so you know, I wanted to I wanted to feel as complete as possible. And so it was really cool. We took a break in between each one.

And when we were done, she said, Sandy said, I literally see your shoulders lifted. So I just had the opportunity to to process a lot of relationships that I had, which is really important for me because I grew up not really talking about my emotions. Like that just wasn't a family dynamic. And especially with children, like the kind of the idea was, you don't, you know, you don't let children know all, you know, all the stuff that's going on, you get, you hide that stuff from them.

And it's not, you know, there was no will. There was no example I got to see like a problem happen. And here's how I'm feeling, here's how I processed it and we're moved on. It was just more like going the other room.

We have to talk about some things. So, you know, when I started at the certification training, it really was, Russell used to call it kind of a war of the worlds. And it was that for me, it was a complete change from what I was used to in learning to start to talk about some of the things that I just would never, you know, bothered to say. And I got to do that over and over again times 10 just just before I started my class.

So yeah, I always called myself from the start, like the biggest cheerleader for the method because of the shift that it made in my life. And in me understanding like what's the healthiest way for me to move forward, you know. And it's still a practice. It's something, it's something I got always work through.

And there's always moments where I realized, oh, yeah, I'm not dealing with that. Let me, but at least I think now that I have the awareness that I know on the other end of things, the sense of, I know we talk about the freedom, the freedom that comes with like knowing like I don't have to have a sense of frustration, anger, resentment, or whatever the emotion is that was just bubbling up inside that I can actually be free from it. And there could be another option that I can live by. So yeah, that's really, that's that's the cheerleader I do.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, what the American do. Yeah, no, that's great. And you know, and I know that all of us, we kind of, what's great about our work, what, personally, what I love about our work is is I don't have to have the same loss that you have to be able to assist you with this to give you the tools.

And then you're doing the heavy lifting on your on your loss. So we don't have to have the same loss for me to assist you or vice versa, right? And so, but I think a lot of us, because of our our life experience, we do often have communities we want to help because we know, we may not know how they feel, but we know how we feel when we've had a similar type of loss. So a lot of grief for every specialist, although they are willing and frequently help people of all different types of losses, a lot of the time we do kind of have a passion for one community or another, right?

And I know, I know for a while, just as friends living in Los Angeles together, I saw you navigating, you know, dating and and being in relationships, you know, and, you know, and I was just I was always, I just always admired the amount of work you're willing to apply grief recovery with in terms of that, like the heartbreak and the hopes and the dreams and the expectations. And I met someone new. And if something, you know, didn't work out in the heartbreak around that and like you just were so courageous in the way that you applied these skills to keep your heart open and to keep your heart free and ready for the right person, which, you know, has happened. And I'm so happy for you for that.

But can you kind of talk just a little bit about, you know, just again, navigating heartbreak and and and being single and you know, those kind of things, the things I watched you walk through, can you kind of talk about the grief recovery in that context? Sure. And just for context, because I, I don't look my age, but I was we're talking about when I was in my 40s. I was, I got married at the age of 45.

So we're talking about prior to that. And, you know, obviously a lot of my friends were married with family. And I was, you know, I was a good babysitter. But it's it's it's quite the experience to desire a family of your own and be kind of adjacent to others, but to not really have your.

So that's just one, I think, one part of the grieving aspect for single people who want to have a family that they go through. Russell, at the time, the institute was in was it Valley Village, Sherman Oaks? And I was about, I lived about a mile away from there. So I spent a lot of time actually at the office.

And Russell would call me his fourth daughter, his fourth adopted daughter. And the, we got into a habit like my first four programs, grief recovery programs that I did was me calling him the day after and saying, here's what happened. Here's, here's a question that was brought up. Here's how I answered.

How would you have answered it? So we were in this habit of just reaching out, of me reaching out and us talking through a lot of things grief recovery-related. And that spilled over into my dating life. So I talked to Russell about just life situations.

And one thing in particular, I like, I'll never forget I was dating this guy and somebody like a boyfriend from early on in life. And so, you know, that excitement of, oh, maybe this is, it's, you know, the second time around, or you know, all this excitement. And then it just started to go a little south. And I remember talking to Russell about it.

And I was like, Russell, I don't think I feel like this one isn't going to work out. But here I am still trying. And so what's wrong with me? Like, why am I doing this?

And, and what he said, I'll never forget. He said, you know, you, you're so accustomed to this work that you know that if it doesn't work out and your heart is broken, you already know that you can recover. And I've never forgotten that. So that's one of the many gifts that I feel I've gotten from the method is a sense of bravery in not being afraid to do something for fear that that it's not going to work out or for fear that it's, you know, that I might get my heart broken.

Like, I'm still trying to operate in wisdom, obviously, but just knowing that if it doesn't, and I was thinking about this the other day, I was thinking if this part of the conversation came up, I was going to thank you because I don't know if you remember. So the next relationship I was in that didn't work out, um, he cheated. And I remember you talking to me on the phone and saying, hey, you know, I need you to know that all men don't cheat. And this is not your like lot in life and the direction that you gave me in that conversation was absolutely what I needed to hear without me even knowing that that's what I needed to hear.

So, um, yeah, you've been in a very important part in that dating journey where I swear I should remember that conversation, you know, and, uh, again, like, I'm just, I'm so grateful for these tools for me, for you, and for so many others, you know, I have people very near and dear to me that have navigated that similar journey of, of wanting to find the one and it's just not quite working out. And, um, but not losing hope and not closing off and hardening your heart to that, to that opportunity, right? And like you said, I miss Russell so much shout out to Russell Friedman for those of you who are listening, who don't know who we're talking about. He was one of the kind of co-founders of this method, Russell Friedman, just such a wise guy, wise man and would take hours just helping talk to people.

You know, he has given me so much life advice in you and, and countless others and he, he was such a selfless man in terms of the amount of, um, time he spent just trying to help other people sort out their life and, and share a grief recovery tools with them and stuff. So, um, Russell, uh, hopefully you're listening somewhere, you know, in heaven or wherever and we love you very much, buddy. Um, so yeah, no, but I remember that conversation we had and also, I think we're, we've both moved away from LA. I think we both equally miss sugarfish and probably some other restaurants.

Justin, I were, you're the one who introduced me to sugarfish. It's your phone. I are, uh, foodies and so we would, we would go do a training and then grab good, good food. So, all right, so let's, let's pivot now if you, or you're okay with it or let's, let's not, let's stay on this for, because again, I think it's such a, uh, a critical peace in society today, right?

You, you have these online dating apps. I mean, the, the, the landscape of dating in our, in our world has changed so drastically, right? And the amount of distractions out there and the amount of access you have to different people and, you know, and being ghosted by someone and, I, I think so many people are struggling with this and I think that most, you know, most people out there don't know of this tool called grief recovery, which can help you navigate this. So, you know, Jocelyn, can you talk a little bit about how you have helped other people kind of navigate this journey?

Um, do you find that they don't necessarily even think of it as a grief event or as a loss of events until you educate them on that or how do you, you know, how do you, how do you help others with this? What are you seeing out there in the world? Well, most of the people who have come for grief recovery, if it's due to like dating and relationships, they were clear, um, that they were grieving because, um, because typically was the, they just broke up with someone. So I, I, I know Jocelyn time, um, I had a couple who were, um, they ended their, um, they were engaged, they ended their engagement and they both showed up the first day, um, for, for my grief recovery program, not knowing the other person was going to be there.

Um, so, and they both just disappeared and they came back to me and they, they figured it out themselves and figured which one was going to stand, which one wasn't going to go. So what, when I do grief recovery, like my experience has been that, um, people, it's been something, I know, on the heels of a breakup or something that's very intense for them emotionally at that moment, but then there's a whole other segment of people who I, I think don't think of what they're going through as, as a grief event. Um, and so the, the moving on curriculum, there's grief recovery and Steve has a book called moving on and, um, the, the curriculum that's still, you know, being developed and I've done, you know, a few pilots on it, I think is profound because we don't have to necessarily use the word grief because what people do know is that their heart has been broken or they have these hopes, dreams and expectations for a relationship, for a family or they had something that they felt was, you know, they had a whole life in a particular person and a particular situation and a relationship.

And when that ends and they don't know either what to think of, you know, if that's available to ever going to be available to them again, you know, sometimes people have a loss of trust or a loss of many things. It could be a loss of trust, a loss of safety, a lot of intangible losses that people can have, just in this whole dating world. So, um, I think promoting moving on is, is wonderful because it reaches people who would never think that they're a griever, but, but they understand the other language, they understand their life, they understand what they hope and dream for, but don't have, or they understand when something changes and they're having a hard time navigating what their life is like now without that person. Yeah, and the other thing too, I think, one of the, one of the pieces of puzzles, one of the, one of the things that we kind of fill in, the blank that we fill in for people, I think a lot of the time is, and we've talked, touched on this on other podcasts, but there is also, believe it or not, whether your mom or your dad or both are living or who have died, you know, or a combination of, both, we carry a lot of unresolved grief from our role models, from our, the authority figures on, you know, kind of what we took in about what was acceptable in relationships, how was it, this is, you know, how to be treated, how to treat others in a romantic relationship.

We carry a lot of unresolved grief around mom or dad or both, right, and, or, and their romantic journey. And a lot of the time for in complete with that stuff, we bring that into our current relationships, and a lot of the time that stuff sabotages our current relationships. And if we don't know how to get complete with a lot of that stuff, again, we could be sabotaging ourselves over and over in relationships. And I think that's another place where people don't often know where to look, and they, they certainly aren't probably not equating that with unresolved grief around a relationship we wish could have been different.

But indeed, it's something we can help people work on. You know, so in other words, right, someone may come to Jocelyn and say, Hey, I want to work on my ex-boyfriend. And, you know, she'll be happy to help you with that. But a lot of the time when we, when we kind of keep uncovering the layers, we may find some stuff that we need to complete with that or with mom or, or do those two other relationships so that we can really look at the whole puzzle so that we really have an opportunity to meet the right person for us.

But it's, it can be much more challenging to do that if if you haven't gone on unpacked a lot of that and gotten what we call emotionally complete with that. So can you talk on that at all? Like if you can, I don't put you on the spot a little bit, but can you think of any stories where really you had to go help people with a parent or some other kind of piece of the puzzle that maybe they didn't necessarily think they were there for initially? Someone who came for a relationship and then realized there was more work to be done around like mom or dad.

Does has that happened for you? Yeah, I'm trying to think of, one person did come to mind. So she started, she started my group and she, she said her biggest issue is I can't get my, my ex out of my mind. Like I broke up with him and I keep, I keep feeling tempted to get back with him, even though I know he's not right for me.

And I really feel like plague. It's like that's the word for you. Like I hope plagued. I can't, I just can't get him out of my mind and we've gotten through the romantic review where you look at a lot of relationships, not just that one in your life.

And I can't remember what was the light bulb for her if it was, I'm blanking on if it was mom or dad, but something came up, like a particular loss came up for her where she there were things that she kind of suppressed. She just wasn't talking about some things and she felt like this was a safe space to finally express how she really felt. And it was in, I think it was around a week four of doing that when we, when she, when she talked about that and found some emotional vocabulary around what that experience was for her. She, she realized how she, that's why she was showing up in that particular relationship, why she felt like she had to, I think she had to like, she didn't feel like she had to prove anything to herself and what she was doing in that relationship.

And she came to week four and I remember, I'll never forget, she was like, yeah, I'm not even thinking about them anymore. This is, this is the most amazing turnaround in, in a short amount of time. There's a few, yeah, I have to start writing down, I have to think through the, because I'm doing my third, I don't know what, at one point you stopped calling a pilot, but this is the third time around that I've taught it and I have to write down some of the stories because they've been pretty amazing when people start putting the pieces together and realizing it's not just this relationship that is the issue, there's the other unresolved issues in my life that also, I am bringing into this relationship. And a lot of times, you know, our scope is really, like, myopic in the sense like we're looking at the other person, this is what this person has done and not taking a moment to process or realize, well, how am I showing up in relation to this person?

So it gives people an opportunity to look at not just the thing that is, you know, pressing in their mind, but what is it that's unresolved in me or what is it that I keep circling back to? What is the, you know, what are the thoughts that I have about myself? Just the opportunity to really examine those things. So you can change the ones that are, that would be great for you to change, that would be of a benefit for you, for you to be able to achieve the thing you really want.

So that's been the joy of helping people in that way, of helping people kind of connect thoughts for themselves and see things for themselves outside of just the very narrow way they usually come in thinking what it is actually about. Yep, yep, love it. And, you know, I like to, I like to have a happy ending to a story. So, you know, we talked about you really, you know, kind of navigating the dating world in Los Angeles, you know, in your 40s.

And where, where are you now? Let's talk a little bit about kind of where, where you are now. And, and I don't want to give anything away, but you're no longer single. And so I would love to talk to have you talked about kind of that story if you don't mind.

Yeah, so this was right around the time I was, I was traveling back and forth a lot to the Bay Area where my dad was. And so, doing a lot of Southern California, Northern California trips almost on a weekly basis. And I might, you know, talk about that a little bit later. But I had just reconnected with a very good friend from college.

We actually were roommates in our junior year of college. And, and I, and he was on a work trip to LA and we hung out. And it just felt like this was nice. This, I get, you know, aside from it, just being like two friends hanging out, it just, it just felt really good.

And I had one of us texted, I think I texted him. I said, this was really good for my soul. And he's like, I was thinking the same thing. And so he unbeknownst to me, went back to his work and said, every Los Angeles assignment you have.

Oh, I love that. And so we were hanging out. As often as he was coming down and then I was starting to be in Northern California quite often. And it just got to a point where what was going on with my dad was serious enough that I felt like I needed to move back to Northern California.

And then, you know, we were at this, at this point we were dating. And I think he just thought, well, if you're going to be in Northern California, then we should just marry. So he proposed. And yeah, and I was, I was 45 at the ripe young year, just 45.

Getting married for the first time. I loved, I loved being a fly on the wall. And just kind of getting to be a little part of that hearing about that, you know. The before and after, man, I mean, because so many of my friends were rooting for me too, to, you know, to find the right person.

And he proposed, Angela proposed, we were at an event that my friend was running. And so there was a lot of friends who were there. If you, if I could find the clips, like the amount of excitement and energy that the people had when he proposed, like one of my friends was walking up and down the aisle, like it was a catwalk. And somebody else, like literally hopped out of their seat.

It was, it was a lot of fun. Oh, that's great. That's what life's all about. I have not sure if I know this.

Has Angela ever been through grief recovery? He has not. He hasn't. We've talked about it.

We've talked about aspects of the method, but he has been through. We're making it happen. We're making it happen. I gotta talk to him.

Okay, cool. I'm always curious, right? I know, I know for me, it's definitely been a good thing for in my marriage to have me and Ashley, both, both on that, you know, and stuff like that. But anyway, no, that's such a, that's such a cool, like, part of your story is meeting the right guy.

And again, keeping your heart open for the right person and being able to navigate it because you're not bringing all of this baggage from other relationships into it, right? Yeah. And just mind you, that was, he was the, actually, there's like another quick relationship that ended, but that was right after the one, the guy who achieved it. And so, you know, just to enter into, you know, as best as possible, as emotionally complete as possible to enter into a relationship with the person I end up marrying, I think it's a gift to, to the both of us to, um, to just get complete with the stuff that the, the fears, the, the sense of, um, you know, of the worst case scenario.

And again, like what you said to me was so important when you, when you talked to me, because I was, I, it was just such a helpful mental direction for me to be in to then go ahead and just, um, process some things I probably wasn't even thinking about. And some fears that sometimes that people can have, like, especially as you get older, that, okay, that this probably isn't gonna work out for me. And I've heard nonsense like that. And then people take it in because they don't have any other information or, you know, maybe, um, they, their hope is, is faltering because they don't have anything around them that speaks differently.

So, uh, you know, the more work that people do using the grief recovery method and really, really getting complete with things that they have been hoping for that are not available to them at the moment is, um, will help them be in the best possible position when you do find someone. Because you bring, you bring all your junk with you. So if you can clear as much of it out, that's, that's great. Yep.

That's, that's absolutely right. I mean, that's definitely what, what I had to do to be prepared to, to stay in my relationship is I had to go and, and say goodbye and, uh, to a lot of emotions around some of my past relationships, you know, um, I had to just clear that, clear that out. And I think that's another thing that people really would, would benefit from looking at is like, again, we touched on, hey, mom and dad, there's probably some old kind of belief systems there that we could probably give back to them, because they're not serving us in our romantic relationships. And then also, I think it's always good to go and, and, and, you know, if you really look and you, you look at it through your heart, you probably find a couple of relationships that really hit you hard.

You know, I've, for me, one of them was like my high school sweetheart, you know, and then, and then a couple of other relationships, I had to go say goodbye to otherwise, I'm going to always like be the bar for my current marriage with Ashley is going to always be, you know, she's going to be compared to these like moments in time with different people in different times of my life. And it's just not fair. It's not fair to her to, to be like, you know, my wife with four kids, a ton of stress, mortgage, all the drama we have right now, like I can't compare that to the high school sweetheart where it was just all roses all the time because we're, you know, 15, 16 years old. Like, so I had to go, you know, and, and so anyway, each person is obviously very different and you got to go find the different stuff.

You got to go complete and, and shut the door on. So, to have an opportunity to stay, stay committed and stay in a relationship and stay in loving the other person and, and not, you know, not, not taking all this stuff and old passhirts that other people did and just being like, well, you'll do it too because that's what all you guys do, you know, or whatever the case is. Like, I think this allows us to really treat people as individuals because a lot of the time, I think we're not doing that. And we're not, we don't even know we're not doing that, you know, we are, we're bringing in old stuff from other relationships and this person is either getting a blame for it or we're like pre pre judging them or that, you know, like all those, all those kind of things.

So it's almost like we have a relationship with our ideas or we have a relationship with our own unresolved grief and there's this person who just happens to be in front of it us. I remember your dad, like he would tell the story and I think it's in the, moving on book two to a degree. He would told the story of, you know, how he got his heart broken when he was in high school and his mom told him that there are plenty of fish in the sea. So he just thought, okay, I'll just go out and get another girlfriend and but I show up to this girlfriend less trusting, less alive, less hopeful.

But I'm expecting them to give me 100% and with each subsequent breakup, I become less trusting and less alive, but expecting the other person to be fully trusting in my life. And I remember your dad said, it got to the point when when I was introducing myself to one girl, I was already thinking of the next one, I was going to try to have her relationship because I'm already fully expecting this one not to even work. And so the work that you do really processing these things helps you regain, we always talk about expanding our capacity for happiness. So when we get emotionally complete, we expand, even what our idea of what happiness can be because it can get smaller and smaller with each subsequent loss that's not resolved.

And we tend to think that this is the best that there is. And we tend to forget that, no, it can be better, it can be greater, it can be healthier. And I can have trust and hope in someone. And that only comes from really talking about what it is, know what your fears are, what your hopes are, what are all the things that are in you that are just sitting there and not being dealt with and really doing some work on them.

And so that's another one of the things that I love that I think moving on curriculum is very specific to for people. Hoping to either better the relationship they are in or to have hope for one in the future. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so for those of you that are kind of like, what do you guys talk about?

So there's one of our books is called Moving On. And you can get it on Amazon, you can get it on our website. But if you are struggling with, you know, any sort of relationship issue, whether that's a current or recent breakup, whether that's, you know, again, just trying to navigate the dating world, wherever you're at, this book was designed specifically around romantic heartbreak. And so please, please, please, you know, get a copy of that book, read it, email us if you have questions.

And then what Jocelyn's talking about is we're developing right now, you know, a program to go along with that book to help people around. Again, unresolved grief and loss, but that's not usually what people think it is, right? They're just like, well, I'm heartbroken over this, this breakup or this divorce or what have you. And they're not looking at it through the lens of grief, but we know it is grief, right?

It's the death of a relationship. It's a death of a friendship. It's the death of hope streams and expectations for the rest of our lives, right? It's all those things and that is all grief.

But again, you can put that word to the side. And this book is beautiful and that it's really going to just focus on the tools that we can use to help you with that. So, so definitely get that book if this is something that's resonating with you right now, you know. So let's, let's, let's kind of pivot a little bit if you're okay with it, Jocelyn.

So another thing that I really can relate to you on more now than ever, and at the time you were kind of dealing with this before I was, but like having aging parents, right? And having parents where you're having to take care of them, you're having to make kind of decisions sometimes almost like you feel like you are now the parent, right? I'm kind of living that in different ways right now with just my mom getting older. She's still still very, very sharp and still like completely adult.

So mom, if you're listening, don't get mad at me. But, you know, just, but with my dad being sick and battling cancer and just, you know, doing stuff as a child, I never thought I was going to do for my father because you just don't think that way. You know, would you, would you be willing to tell us a little bit about your journey with your father and kind of again, how that coincided with grief recovery as well? Yeah, I'd be happy to because I feel like this is one of the life experiences that most people don't talk about and you're not prepared for and it just happens to you and you have to figure it out on the spot and then on top of the grief attached to it.

So, you know, one of the definitions we use for grief is that it's a change in a familiar pattern of behavior, but nobody talks about the particular change when a child really becomes the parent in the relationship. And so in the situation with my dad, like again, we, you know, my mom and dad were very, they thought what they were doing was protecting me by not talking about things around me. So, they, you know, they made a habit of isolating me from conversations that were emotional in nature or anything that would require me really. And this is probably another story for another day, but when I was, when I was 12, I moved out of the house, 11, 12, I moved out of the house for a year or two to help take care of my grandmother because when my grandfather died, she just needed a lot of support.

She had never been sick a day in her life, but when after he died, she started to get sick and she needed support and she needed somebody to live with her. So, I, it could have been, this is, I literally am just thinking about this for the first time. Maybe it was partly that too of me having some adult responsibilities at such a young age that they were really trying not to add any more to my play, I guess. And that, this continued on into my adult year.

So, here I am now an adult and my dad had a stroke and he had, he was at his, the pool hall that he loved to play at and true to form, that my father is being lifted into the ambulance and he tells his friend, don't tell Jocelyn. And his friends like, yeah, okay, okay. And they take him off to the hospital and he dials me up. And that really began the shift and the change in the journey in our relationship.

And so, it was not only that, but there was some situations where he was being taken advantage of from financially. And he was trying to, he needed my help. He tried his best to do it on his own and it just got so bad he finally just told me what was going on. And so, he needed my help trying to untie all the things that had been put in place to try to, you know, take a lot of things from him.

And so, I was, I was, yeah, and that was a definite time of grief. Obviously, and it took a while for me to even be able to articulate what was so frustrating. And it is that idea of, I'm acting in the role of the parent now, but I'm the child. But there does come a point where, where that happens for most people.

And I know sometimes people joke about, you know, oh, you know, one day, you know, I'll be, like the parent will say, something, one day you're going to change my diapers again. Like I changed yours when you were a kid. But so, but people say that jokingly, but we don't think about the fact like, no, there's going to come a day where your parent is at an age where they need help and assistance. And you are going to have to step into a role that looks more like the parent than you being the child.

And that being such a, such a tremendous change in shift in what you've known to be true about your, yourself, especially if you grew up, I don't know if I should say especially, just it is overall. But just, you know, if you, if you grew up with, you know, maybe more authoritative parents where they made it very clear that you are the child and you do, as I say, to then step into a role where you are now that in that authoritative role. Man, yeah, there's, I don't know, is there a book for that? I've never seen it.

I've never seen like a blog post. But I think more people should be become prepared for that. And it could happen. You know, I'm not that old, but it's, I've already experienced it.

And so I think people should just at least be aware of it that that for most of us can be coming down, you know, down the pipeline. I was just going to mention one other thing that I was going through in that time was that he, you know, he had gotten to such a deep hole with this other person. I was really frustrated with my dad because I felt like had you just told me at the beginning when you were having trouble, we wouldn't have to be undoing everything that this, you know, this person is attempting to do. But that was more, that was more along the lines of still stuff for my childhood of always wanting to have some information, but not getting it, you know, from my parents.

You know, we call it cumulative grief, but it's, it's just a lot of examples that I could pull from from childhood that this, this experience kind of feels like that as well. Yeah. Now, I know, they're correct from from wrong, but I'm, I'm pretty sure you had done the grief recovery work years before on your relationship with your dad. Is that right?

You, I did hit, I did my dad in my training. Okay. So, so just for the audience, just to kind of, like again, give you a little bit of the timeline, right, is, is Jocelyn came roughly in 2010, did the grief recovery method, she did her work on her relationship with her father, right? Although he was living at the time, again, a lot of people don't know this, but you can and should do grief recovery work on living relationships.

It's very, very key to a lot of the time repairing relationships, right? Or setting new boundaries or, you know, it's different for everyone, obviously. But the point is is Jocelyn did a bunch of work on saying goodbye to a bunch of like pain and hurt from her childhood with her dad. Do you think that equipped you?

Do you think that helped you to be there for your dad, you know, years later when really you are having to be the authoritative figure, you know, as you put it like for him, did you, do you think you could have done, I mean, I'm sure you would have done it either way, but do you think that that helped you navigate that in ways you wouldn't be able to if you hadn't done that work before? Yeah, I think so for, for a couple of reasons, well, help me, and that's a great point. I just want to second your point because when I went to my training, I just assumed my mother had already died, she died in 2002. And so I just assumed, I think Russell gave me enough of a hint that I knew I was going to be doing some personal work.

So in my mind, I was like, okay, I'll process some things with losing my mom. That was my assumption. And then I got in there and Russell started talking about unresolved grief and I realized, oh, if this is a conversation of unresolved grief, there's more things that have happened that I've just never talked about, you know, with with my dad. So that's why I chose to work on that relationship.

Because when he's when my parents split up, he left. So I just, so there's a time where it was just me and my mama. So I just was sure that was going to be just by nature of state, you know, spending more time with her that that was what I was going to work on. But I really, you know, that's not really the most important thing when you're talking about unresolved grief was just things that you have felt or experience or not processed, not talked about.

And so yeah, I think what was key for me was to identify when my parents split up what was frustrating for me and specifically, specifically even with my dad. It gave me like more of an awareness of some of the storylines that I had in my head. Some of the conclusions I had came to about my dad, some of them true, some of them probably not, some of them just out of my frustration. I started to see him in a lens of, you know, we would call it the devilment, but I would just see things that really I had created out of frustration and not just out of my relationship with him.

So, you know, in processing, processing my relationship with my dad, I was able to say goodbye to, um, to some of the frustrations I had that I hadn't spoken about. I was able to forgive him for for ways that I in my head thought you should have showed up this way with my mom or you should have done this or x, y and z. I was able to forgive those things, which helps me then be more present with him instead of having all those things in my head when, um, when I'm, when I'm around him, which would have just made the situation even more difficult. It was hard enough to, to manage.

You have all that going on on top of it. Um, it just, and it just helped me see like I always, I always, there's, there hasn't, but there's only been one time, there's only been one time I haven't used my, my dad's example when I'm doing certification trainings and that was like my training, my first training after he died, it was just, it was just, that was too much. Um, but I, I like to use the, the graph, um, the example of, of my dad, um, because I think it's a great example of how we can get so caught up in our heads and our frustrations that we start to see people, a particular way and it's not even, and we start to think that that's the truth of who they are. And we're not even aware of the stories we've made up versus who they actually are.

Um, and so, um, yeah, did I, did I answer this? Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful answer. And, and that's kind of what, where, I didn't make this point, but, but you did. So thank you.

Um, um, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't trying to imply, hey, you know, Jocelyn did grief recovery work years ago on her dad. So it's all smooth sailing here, right? It's like, no, I can't imagine how gut wrenching it was for you to help your dad navigate when he was kind of losing different faculties as a, as a man, you know, like, and like you said, that's hard enough without 20, 30, 40 years of unresolved grief around dad too that you have to deal with, right? And that's, uh, sadly, what most kids, uh, are having to deal with.

They haven't done any work from the past. They're still trying to navigate current stuff with their aging parent. And it's, it feels so overwhelming because it is, right? Because, and so it is just a benefit for any of us, it, who find themselves in this, in this position to go and have already, hopefully, ideally, already done a bunch of work to unload a lot of the pain, a lot of the heavy backpack of emotions from mom or dad so that when we're navigating what is currently happening, which is again, gut wrenching and painful and heartbreaking as it is, we don't have all that other stuff weighing us down because we've already worked on it, right?

And that was kind of my point. It's like, when I was, when my dad was battling cancer and dying, uh, essentially, they're, they're, you know, it, I'm glad I did grief recovery work on in the past around him and I had done relationship graphs and letters with him and a ton of stuff that didn't make it any less painful in the moment seeing what was happening, but I'm still grateful I did that because it was indeed a different experience having done a bunch completion work around my dad and still heartbroken, but not, uh, it's hard to explain the feeling until you kind of done this work, but you know, just like again, just, oh, go ahead. Well, I was just thinking towards that like it, it really is, it really is a journey. If, um, I can't think of a better way to, to, to describe it.

Um, so when, when I, um, we talk about having new discoveries, so like when you do work and then, um, you get emotionally complete with everything you know up until now, I feel like one of the other, uh, and incredible gifts that the, the method does for you, that the grief recovery method gives you is the opportunity to have now new discoveries that you maybe would not have seen or understood unless you had been already emotionally complete with some things. So like once you, once you get some things resolved, it opens your heart and mind up to see things that were there all the time, but you just, you know, you didn't see them and, um, so I just want to share as an example, um, you know, in talking about my dad, um, there are a couple of things that were that did not show up originally on the first graph I did when I was in the training that happened a few years later.

And so I would always share that with people when I'm in a training with them as an example of new discoveries because when my parents split up, sometimes children picked two sides and so for the most part, I chose my mom's side. And so there's, you know, the frustrations I had with my dad, the, the lens I saw through him was a frustration of them no longer being together and he got a little bit more of the blame in my head than, than my mom, right? And it went to the point where, um, like we, we talk, you know, we have a concept where we talk about enshrinement and bedevilment. So my mom got the enshrinement and my dad got the bedevilment, but that's not true.

Like my mom wasn't perfect. My dad wasn't, um, completely not perfect. They, they, they both contributed to that situation. So, you know, after I've done the work in a few years past, this is, this was my new discovery.

I'm watching TV and a Weiner Schnitzel commercial comes on and I had a quick thought, it's like, oh my dad used to take me to Weiner Schnitzel after school. I was like, whoa, wait, that's a good thing. Oh, wait a minute, I have good memories of my dad and I had to go and review my life again and point out all the good things that my dad has done from, because I just, you know, conveniently forgot all of them because I'm carrying another story that these don't fit that story, right? So I had to go back and look at the truth.

So I can fit this into the truth of who my dad is, not just the disappointment I had because they, they split up. Well, that's one of my favorite parts of my job is watching people humanize family members, you know, where again, we're not negating or excusing any of the bad stuff that we carry in these relationships, right? Like, I'm sure your dad did a lot of like really hurtful stuff to you and we want to honor that. We're not trying to brush that under the rug, but, but, you know, to be able to also humanize and find the good in these relationships, oh, often is, is such a gift to watch that unfold for people, not all the time.

Again, there's no absolutes in this work. Sometimes you'll be working with someone and they're, they're literally grieving a monster. But for most of us, right? A lot of the time, if you, if you show someone how to clear out the bad stuff, it does leave their heart and their mind open to find more of the good stuff and they go, oh, my God, like, what a beautiful example right there where this random commercial jogged your memory of like good memories that maybe would have been buried forever if you didn't do grief or recovery.

And that's sad, right? I mean, how many, how many people have memories that are buried? And like you said, they've told the story so many times that's the only part they're focusing on and they're missing all the good from that person. You know, it's such a gift.

I didn't really, yeah. And I just just, you know, like, it wasn't, and I know what you were saying, but it wasn't like, there weren't things in my relationship with my dad there. I felt like there were a lot of negatives towards me. It was a lot just when they broke up with me, you know, picking a sigh.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I, yeah, because my dad was like, I, he, I, I, I've told you, like, my dad and your dad have similar personality styles. Yeah.

And things that would come out of their mouth is like, my dad was a jokester, my dad, you know, did not have a filter. And so, so the, you know, the front facing people knew that about him. And so people knew that he was kind of like the life of the party. And he was, he was just always a, a cool jokai.

Yeah. I've heard Jocelyn's story and I've seen her relationship, graph on her dad. And often I'd be like, oh, my dad would have done that. Oh, that reminds me of my dad.

Well, listen, believe it or not, we are, we are at that hour mark. So we will, we will have to do a part two, Jocelyn. I want to thank you for being on. I want to thank you for your honesty, for your courage, you know, to share with the audience parts of your heart.

And I want to thank you on behalf of again, Russell Friedman, John James, all these people that came before us. I want to thank you for your commitment and all you've done with grief for recovery to help this world. You're just an incredible human being. I'm a, I'm a huge fan and I can't wait to, to have you on again.

Okay. I'd love to come on. Thank you so much for having me. Good, good.

And Jocelyn, where can people find you if they want to get in touch with you? What's kind of the best way for people to get in touch with you? I'd say, I'd say the best way to get in touch with me is just through your my website, jocelynjaxonbulliums.com. There's a, there's a contact me page.

That's the best way to like to directly get in contact with me. And I don't even know who we've talked about this. You let me know if I've told you this, but I've been writing for the past year of monthly column with the second observer. Oh, cool.

So, so you can, you know, check me out through the observer and yeah, and they have contact info at the end of each column I do as well. Okay. All right. So, we'll put, we'll put the link to your website in the show not show notes so people can find you there.

If you want to, you know, get in touch with Jocelyn, but Jocelyn, you have a great rest of your day. And again, thanks for coming on. Feel free again and can't wait to have you on sometime soon. Okay.

Yeah. Hopefully, hopefully sooner rather than later. Sounds, sounds like a plan.