Struggling with Loss? Here’s What Actually Works with Hannah Wachter

So how did you, you know, can you let our audience know how you how you found the method and kind of what motivated you to come get certified. Absolutely, absolutely. And I honestly, I tell this to all my clients. So this is something that is very familiar for me, but in February of 2022, my mom died very unexpectedly.

Like we had a great Christmas together. It was well, it actually was fraught, but we can talk about later when we talk about the method, but we had Christmas together and then February, she just died and like had a stroke a week later, she was gone. And I like you said, I was already doing a lot of healing work with people in my life coaching and mindset coaching practice. And so I was just kind of sharing my grief process socially on on Instagram and Facebook and other things like that.

Not really the ins and outs and the depths of all my personal pain, but just like some thoughts and ideas about grief and how we handle grief as society and it was just interesting to watch the reactions I got from people either got one reaction that was like people were super well meaning they wanted to say the right things they wanted to be supportive they wanted to help but the things they said made me mad. And I was like, cause me more pain, that frankly they pissed me off. I was like, how could be say that to me? Like I know they're trying to be supportive, but it's not supportive.

Like why would you say that? And so there was that reaction or as I was processing and sharing just about my grief, I got people who are like, oh my goodness, thank you so much for finally for for saying this finally someone is talking about this and my brother died seven years ago, and I have never been able to talk about it with anybody or have a space where I don't feel judged. And you're saying everything that I've been feeling. And so I just thought to myself goodness, how can we go through a pandemic where there was lots of loss, lots of death, like not just death, but loss in terms of social.

There's so many different kinds of loss, right? How can we go through that and still not know how to talk about grief and loss. And so I just got a fire under me and I was like, no, I there has to be a better way out there. There has to be a tool or resource or something that can help people know how to show up for other people better.

And at the time I was at my kickboxing studio and I had made these buttons that say, please be gentle with me. I'm grieving and I wore them everywhere. It was like my way of wearing black. Because I think the social convention of wearing black was so good because it was like a signifier to people like, hey, something happened in that person's life, right, you should be kind to them.

So yeah, so I wore it everywhere. And someone at my kickboxing studio approached me and said, hey, have you heard of this program called the grief recovery method? And I was like, no, never heard of it. What is it?

Tell me about it. And she was like, well, you should look into it for your kids because I know that they have a program for parents helping kids with loss. And I was like, yeah, tell me. And so I started to just look online at grief for recovery method.com.

And I got the book and the minute that I read like the first few pages, I was like, this is this is it. This is it. This is the thing. This is the tool that everybody needs to know how to show up for other people in their life and show up for themselves when grief happens to them because grief will happen to everybody.

And this is the language, the knowledge, the normalcy, the grounding that will help people when it happens to them or someone they love. I just, I just, yeah, the first chapter was like, oh, I'm not crazy. Oh, I'm seeing, okay, this is normal. It was just so comforting.

And so then I went through the method myself about my mom and then decided to sign up. So yeah. Wow. Thank you for that.

I am so glad. I'm so glad. Again, I'm always sorry how, how I meet people because usually it's through losing like loved ones, right? So I'm, I'm sorry that you had all of that, which unfortunately, you know, we all none of us escaped those things in life, right?

So I'm sorry, of course, that you had that event, but I'm, I'm always glad when people find this because I feel the same way as you. It's like, we're all going to have this pain and this loss in our life. But what really makes me sad is that most of the world doesn't get access to, you know, any tools, let alone ones like what ones like these. If you don't mind, let's go back to the first thing you said, which was really interesting to me, because I find this as well.

I find often there's like almost two camps of people. There's the people that are well intentioned, but really don't want to hear your pain or they want to change the subject or they want to minimize it. And do it in very kind of abstract, like sneaky ways, right? Not bad people.

But again, the whole thrust of their communication is like, hey, let's get you off of this topic or left it. Let's shift the topic to me or, you know, that. And then you have this other camp who is like, hey, are you willing to talk about grief to, you know, and, and want to kind of lean into it and talk about it. Right.

So, do you remember, do you recall any kind of things or events from the first camp? I mean, do you remember specifically some stuff that like to kind of pissed you off that was said or, you know, you know, and if, yeah, just if you give some examples, I think that's always helpful for people. Totally. Yeah.

So I think, oh goodness, I feel like I could go off on this for a long time. But I think, you know, I have a faith background and I feel like a lot of times people in faith communities want to explain away grief with faith. Like, well, if you just, you know, believe better or God will make it better or all these things, right. That is so that just inflamed me so much because I felt like it was spiritually manipulative.

I felt like it was like your comment. I didn't make a comment about faith. I made a comment about my heartic and my loss. I personally believe that God cares about those things.

So I'm allowed to say those things. Why are you saying that it's almost less than if I express a sadness or a heartbreak already things. So that, that really really made me angry because people will just make these comments like, oh, God won't give you more than you can handle or, you know, God just wanted another angel with them or stuff like that that I'm like, what, what, these things are weird. Like, what are these random statements were saying, like, they don't make any sense.

So that made me really angry. And I would just, I just want people to like pause, especially before they invoke any kind of faith in a way to comfort greavers because it's so damaging because I'm going through grief or already having spiritual question. A lot of a lot of them, not everybody, but some people are already having spiritual doubts or questions come up. So don't inflame it by saying these weird cliches that, you know, don't really help.

That was one thing. Another thing was, you know, again, like I said, I was just publicly expressing and just and I did go off on one post of saying like, we need to do better with each other. We need to figure this out. And I just said, and that was it.

I was just very strong about like, we have to do better. But this is the most universal human experience, just in the way that changes a universal human experience. So is grief every human will encounter grief and loss. How can we can't do better?

We have to do better. And I just remember someone like berating me for being like, well, you should be more understanding. And everyone has the best of intentions and dead, and I just said to that person, like, hey, it's not my job as the person going through the loss to make you feel better about how you're comforting me. Like, that's not my job.

That's like so, that's so misplaced. I'm dealing with so many other emotional things at this time. I'm in a very raw space. And you are coming to me and berating me about like my grief expression or I should be better.

I should be more understanding and more compassionate to those people around me. And I mean, sure, maybe intellectually that could be true. I mean, I'm not going to react to everybody, but I also think that there needs to be that moment where people who are not the immediate ones going through grief are treading very lightly and very carefully and really thinking through their words. I just, I think we are so trained as a culture and as a society to just say these things, but they are very damaging.

They're very dismissive. They, you know, it's like, yeah, try to minimize or explain away people's pain. And all of that stifling of pain and stuff we know just leads to addictions or other bad habits or other toxic things for us as people. So, yeah, those are just some of the some of the instances where I just really just did not react well.

I mean, it was hard for me. Yeah, yeah, no, I don't blame you. And I can really relate. And I appreciate all those examples.

And I've I've experienced a lot of those in similar ways. And so, and then now shifting to the people that you did feel safe with, you did feel comfortable with what, what was kind of the through line with those people, where they just willing to talk about grief as well, where they will and it just listen like what, what stood out to you about the people that felt safe for you during your You know, you're grieving. Yeah, so a couple things. I think it's interesting.

The people that I gravitated to were people who listened well, of course, like they were not there to place a judgment on my experience. They were just like, yeah, I'm here. Let's talk about it. You just talk, you know, they made space for me to show up.

However, I needed to show up at any given moment, day hour, whatever they were just they just made themselves available, right? They were they just listened and they said nothing is off limits. Just say it all and they loved me and they didn't judge. So they didn't kind like when I did say it all, they wouldn't try to come back with a statement to try and fix it either, right?

They just listened. They just loved. They said, yeah, you know, that's okay. They just made this space for me.

I thought that was so important. And again, yeah, didn't try to fix another group of people that I naturally gravitated to were people who have had a loss already like a loss that has rocked their world. You know, I know there's some quote out there about, you know, griebers having a club that nobody really wants to be in, right? But once you had that experience or kind of inducted into this club.

And there is a mutual understanding. So instead of, and this is where I really think the difference between sympathy and empathy is so noticeable. Like you can have friends who have knock on the loss and they do feel sad for you. They do feel heartbreak for you.

But because they've never really encountered it, it's easy for them to kind of be like, okay, well, all right, it's time to put, you know, move on. Let's pull it together or like, let's keep going about our lives. I think people who have had a dramatic loss in their life really get it and they can sit with you in it in a way like no one else can. And so I just naturally gravitated to well, let me say this, I could actually gravitated to people who had had that kind of a loss and also sat with that loss.

So I do think there's people who have dramatic losses, but they, you know, tell themselves all those cliche statements and then cover it up and then just kind of like power through and move on and be strong, right? I gravitated to those people that were like, I've been through it. I let myself have the moment the time, the year, the two years, whatever. And I worked through it.

And I just want you to know you can do that here with me. Those are the people that I really latched on to and and got it or people that were like, I haven't worked through it, but I want to I'm trying to, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, love it. Thank you.

Yeah, that's yeah, it's pretty fascinating stuff. Um, I think that take away for those people who are listening. Um, I what I what I would love for it to be is there are very few things that you can say to agree versus that that are help for our comforting. So you have to be very, very careful with with the words you choose.

In other words, you know, I could sit there and and and what we call be a heart with ears for Hannah for an hour. And I could listen to Hannah and just like listen to everything she's going through. And I can undo all of all of that comfort and that support in one sentence. So after all of that hour, if I say, well, Hannah, you know, God won't give you anything you can't handle.

I can undo. I can become an unsafe person in one line, even though I sat there and was perfect for 57 minutes of it. Right. Because what you know what Hannah's getting at and what a lot of us on this podcast are talking about is we can't fix other people's grief.

And every time we try and come up with a solution at the end of a conversation, it just rings is untrue and impossible for people. Right. And also, you know, at the very least offensive level. It can also ring as minimizing.

It can be, you know, just out offensive. But obviously when we're grieving, we're already very, very sensitive, obviously. And we're and we're looking for people who again have been there in a lot of the time when when you have been there before, you know, there's no words. So you're going to just sit there and listen to the person.

So if you have any inclination in your mind to tell them how to get over it or tell them how to move on or tell them that it could have been worse or tell them that you know exactly what they're going through because you've had that all those things will will will not be safe messages for those people. So at the end after I listened to Hannah for an hour, you know, I may just say, I don't know, even what to say Hannah, can I give you a hug? That's probably how I would end that, right. And I can guarantee you that's going to be a lot more effective at just being a friend to Hannah than well, just trust trust in, you know, trust, just trust in God and that that he won't give you anything more than you can handle, right.

It's just so it's not it's this stuff is not rocket science, but but really the takeaway is just listen and at the end of the conversation. There's no advice needed from you at all, right. It's it's just I heard that and I'm your friend and the next time you want to do that, I'd be honored if if you wanted to if you want to me to just hear you again, you know, because again, there's no. There's very few comments you can make at the end of one of those interactions with the grieving person that's going to that's going to be like, okay, this person, this person gets it.

So yeah, now thank you for for sharing those. Kind of in our pre interview, we talked a little bit. I love the term you used and because I my life is crazy. I've already forgotten it.

But when I heard it at first, I was like, oh my God, that is so genius. Yes, thank you. Unconventional grief. I'm like, oh, that sounds so cool.

No, like so I want you to kind of talk about it. I have an idea. Kind of what you're going to cover, but I love that term. So please tell us tell us kind of that term and what you mean by that.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think I have been in a networking group for the last eight months talking about the grief work and I always am trying to get people to think outside the box, because they're always like, well, you help people who've, you know, someone's died and that's the only person you help. And I'm like, no, not really. There's over 40 different life events, right?

That caused feelings of grief and loss. So think outside the box, thinking an unconventional way. You know, I talk about divorce. Of course, that's another maybe one that people I could see could think is a little bit more obvious, but you know, but you're right.

Even let's not to cut you off, but you're right. Even with that one. Let's say somebody has a divorce. They're not Googling grief recovery groups right away.

Most most people where where they really could benefit from that work. Right. So you're right. Even if they like as a passing thought may be say, yeah, this is a grief experience.

They still don't think the solution lies in grief work. And I think both of us would say, absolutely the contrary grief work should be in my opinion, your first stop. Absolutely. Absolutely.

So it's getting people almost to reframe life events in some ways. So like things that they would consider stressful. Usually also carry some grief with it. So I also, I love to lean into the second definition that we use in the grief recovery method that grief is those conflicting feelings that come when there's a change over end end of our change in a familiar pattern of behavior, right.

So when you think about it like that. Okay. Well, let's see. I, you know, I changed careers.

I had a career for 20 years. I had a whole routine and system and life built around that going into work and getting my coffee at this time and getting lunch from here and saying, how do my favorite, you know, barista or whatever. And now I'm not doing that. Let's say because well, that would throw in another thing.

But now I'm not doing that. I changed careers. It's not just a job change. There's grief in that.

It's the whole, the whole way that you've been operating for 20 years. There's an adjustment. There's something underneath there to talk about, right. When seasons change like that.

We, you know, we think maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic or I'm just having a hard time adjusting. But all of those feelings that you're experiencing. They're grief. There's grief.

There's grief in it. You know, so I think helping people reframe what constitutes as a grief event. So again, like I was saying, I'm in this networking group. And I, I'm constantly talking about like, well, you know, when you move when you have loss of mobility.

I, I fell back in May and really damaged my knee. Like to the point where I just had a really hard time like going up and down stairs. For two to three months. And I don't on me as a specialist talking about people, you know, talking about it with people all the time.

It didn't dawn on me until about the end of the summer that I was like, I am grieving my ability to move. I grieve that like when I was playing with my nephews this summer, I couldn't run and chase after them because my knee is damaged. And I have to be like, okay, I'll play with you. Like do a board game and like, yeah, trying to do different things, but I want to get down on the floor and I want to like wrestle and do stuff, but I couldn't do that because of my knee.

There was grief there for me. I was sad about it. I was struggling with it. And that's just me with my knee.

Imagine people who have more like more severe loss of mobility. There's grief there, right? You can't get up and do the things you want to do. You can't push your grandchild in a stroller.

You can't, I don't know, go camping or hiking with your family for that one thing you've always done. That's grief. There's grief there. You know, so just getting people to think about it differently.

Or just even also approach topics that we don't really like to talk about in society. There's things like infertility. Of course, there's tons of grief there. You know, also grieving things.

I think grieving a lot of the unmet hopes, dreams and expectations. I talk about that all the time with my clients or people that I'm trying to introduce this work to. There are things that you expect for your life. We all have them.

We don't realize we have them. We don't realize we've attached like a whole set of hopes and on things like that onto certain events or people or places or whatever. But we do. And when those things will not come to pass and there's something that says, okay, that's not going to happen for you.

It's like for such infertility, you know, sorry, you're not going to be able to conceive or have a child. There's a whole grief process that happens with that. We need to, I want to make more spaces for those kinds of things because it's not, you know, all grief, grief is grief. Right.

And it's, it's manifest differently, but death isn't the only thing that causes us a lot of turmoil and pain. And so I want it to be okay to talk about that too. You know, and I know I'm just conscious of the person who's like, wow, I, I can't have a baby. And I'm really grieving that versus my best friend who just lost her dad to cancer or whatever.

I feel like I can't talk about the painful thing that I'm grieving because death matters more than the thing that I'm grieving. You know, so there again is that comparing and minimizing thing that I, I comes up a lot, I think when we think about unconventional grief. Yeah. And thank you for bringing this up.

And as you know, we have, we've never used a term unconventional grief, but I may steal that from you and I'll give you credit, but I love it because we, you know, again, we were pretty much the pioneers of saying grief is not just about death, right? And we didn't, we didn't start that way, by the way. We thought that grief was all about death initially. You know, my father, when we first started doing this work, we were in the same kind of camp as everybody else.

And we evolved. And we saw, oh no, no, no, no, no, right. This was the very, very early days, but, but, but, you know, even the grief recovery institute 50, 45 plus years ago was like, oh yeah, grief is about death. And we evolved and, and saw all these other people struggling and hurting with all these different life events.

That's, that's another podcast. But my point is, is that the your term is just brilliant because it is, it is what we need to do to really start like you said earlier to start supporting each other and showing up for each other. And loving each other is understand that like so much of what are people are going through daily is grief. And there is still a very large camp of, you know, people in the grief world leaders, you know, of the grief world, who still want grief to be exclusively about death, right?

And there's probably people listening to this podcast who are, you know, have had serious loss due to a death of a loved one who are probably ticked off that we're even talking about grief being other topics, right? And I think we need to really re-evaluate and reassess that because what that does is that really leaves and isolates a bunch of people who are having that experience, but don't feel like they qualify. You know, in a very, very bad example of, of not a parallel, but I'll just a little piece of my story is I got sober when I was 21 years old, right? Yeah.

And, you know, they talk about in, in 12 step programs, they talk about how the bar used to be in the 30s and 40s, you had to be a homeless, lost everything, you know, drunk. That's what you had to be to be an alcoholic. And then through, through the years, they were like, oh, no, that 18 year old kid, maybe they didn't have the marriage to lose and the business to lose. They didn't have any of those things, but emotionally they lost everything, emotionally they're bankrupt, right?

And I'm so glad that they started opening that tent for lack of a better word to more people who just hadn't gotten to that place yet, right? Or just hadn't had that exact same experience they did, but that didn't mean they didn't qualify or have a problem, right? And not just, of course, I'm not saying grief is a disease or, you know, whatever we qualify addiction as I'm not trying to draw that parallel. But what I am trying to say is that people when I was 21 and I hit a bottom emotionally with drugs and alcohol, those 40 and 50 and 60 year old guys that were homeless, they still put an arm around me and we're like, you don't have to go through all of that.

Like if you think you're struggling and if you have a problem, like I'm going to, I want to help you with that problem, right? And it changed, it changed the trajectory of my life, it saved my life because I'm convinced if I would have kept going, I would have died, I would have lost everything, I would have gone similar, just knowing who I know I am now. Like, you know, so anyway, now moving again, moving over to grief, it's like, I don't know if we had anyone hand in our training. But correctly, if someone pops into my, a lot of the time they all have, I'll have a 19 or 20 year old in my training, right?

And of course, they're lost, yeah, but of course, they're lost history graph, generally speaking, isn't as long as someone who's in their 40s or 50s. But when you start working with them on the things they identify as hurtful for them, you better believe they're grieving at 100% of what that relationship was in their life experience. You better believe their heart is broken into a thousand pieces and we can help them with that. You know, so I'm, I'm passionate because like news flash, I was that kid, like my dad was like, hey, you know, when I was 21, he was like, you're flying a tampon getting certified in grief or coverage.

And I'm like, I don't have, you know, I don't have any grief dad, like they're, they're going to all laugh at me, right? And that wasn't the case at all. You know, very quickly within a day, we identified that we all have pain, we all have grief and we're going to support each other in that. And if anyone is here to judge someone else, then you got to go, right?

And those were the guidelines that those were the boundaries because we need, we need to make it safe enough for everyone to understand that like you have heartbreak and you have sad events and there are things you can do. And you don't have to wait until this, this, or this happens to do work and learn these tools. And then when those other things happen, you have the tools and you know, yeah, did I know what I was in store for when I was 21 at that first training? Did I know that I was going to have to like help carry my dad's like lifeless body into a, you know, into a hers to get him to the, to the funeral home?

Like, no, I didn't know that. And, but this, I guarantee you the stuff I was working on at at 21 was big enough for me at 21 with the life experience in the loss I had right and everyone honored that. You know, so that's why it's, yeah, that's why it's so critical. And that's why I think, you know, we're staying on this for a bit is because we have to as a community call it the grief community, call it whatever you want.

We have to start letting go of this idea of this like pecking order and this like no, no, I'm the top griever and listen to my story because it's way worse than yours. Like any level of that is like not helping you. It's not helping the other person. It's not helping anyone.

So let it go. Right. And if you can't let it go, that's maybe a clue that we have some really serious unresolved grief of our own. If what I'm saying right now is angering to you, that's fine.

I'm cool with that. You can point that at me, but really it may be that you have some really unresolved stuff going on. I have like so many different thoughts going off like based off what you said, but I think, that's one reason why people are resistant to grief groups. I because there's one person in the room who always is like, but mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine is the greatest, mine is the worst, mine was the hardest, mine was the most painful.

Yeah, that really hard thing might have happened to you, but mine is basically like the best. It's like I have the best grief story there possibly is. And you know, really latching and therefore and I'm sorry to interrupt, but and therefore I can't recover. That's that's that's the through line.

And therefore like this won't work for me, but anyway, go ahead. That's right because because what that person has done now is said, I have taken my grief and I've made it and I my identity. This is my identity. This is who I am.

I am the person that this thing happened to and I love love love. And thankfully I haven't had any clients to date where this has been a hard thing for them, but just this whole the whole conversation about personal responsibility. Like are you willing to say, yes, this thing happened to me, but now I still have the power to choose and decide how I'm going to go forward. I don't I'm not going to like take my grief and wear it around me like a coat and be like, this is all that I am and this is everything, you know, that I can ever be going forward.

I love the conversation about personal responsibility because you have to decide there's always a decision point and I always I feel like people like feel like it if some people who get in this martyr space with their grief. I think they feel like you know they're conflating a lot of different things, but I think they also believe that if I move on it's somehow disrespecting the person or the whatever I've lost, but I always like to say, does that do you think that person really wants you to be stuck here living like this becoming this person that's honestly hard to talk to difficult to work with. No, they don't want that for you right so I think I think that that happens a lot, but I think that's one reason why people also are so hesitant with grief groups because they're like oh my gosh I can't sit here i'm already dealing with my own thing to then have somebody else in the room be like well my thing is that thing you know I think that's that's too much it's hard it's really hard yeah.

I also love cold like just you bringing in like how old you were when you became a specialist and just validating the experiences of people at whatever age they're at I guarantee you every like every lost history graph. People remember their stuff from when they were in 10 12 15 17 18 those things are real they hurt people bring them up all the time I haven't I am currently working with an 85 year old gentleman who like a bunch of his things were in his first 20 years of life that happened to him. So yeah you have to have you've had plenty of experiences by that age where you can say wait I need to pause and I need to acknowledge this I think for me in my own personal story I grew up in an abusive home I wish that I had gone through the method when I was 19 20 21 because I think some of my coping mechanisms are stirbs as we love to call them are some of my short term energy relieving behaviors.

That turns into patterns as an adult would be so different if I had some of that intervention and some of that conversation and that awareness piece to say okay yeah what happened to me was not okay I lost safety I lost trust but let's grieve it let's grieve it all the way and then now you can continue on in a way that you have tools you have resources you've said it you know it's out there. It's complete so yeah I just I wish that I think it's I think it's brilliant for people to go through it at an age that where they're really ready to sit down and do the work I think that's so important just that intervention almost. Yeah yeah me too I always love when we see kind of younger people getting access to this and and a lot of the time it happens by parents who have been through grief recovery who are like hey you should go look at this right and and that's great.

And I just want to circle back a little bit to the the the support group thing that you you talked about right because it's really important what I love about our work is that again in our grief support groups we very very quickly make sure people know that they're welcome and they're welcome no matter what the losses that brought brought them there. What I have found is even if people are struggling with that statement internally like in other words maybe they're they're one of those people that was at the group that's like no no like I I lost I had this type of loss nothing trumps that nothing compares like they they may struggle with what the boundaries were setting internally. But guess what by day two or three they can support that other person they can support that you know 21 year old who's working on their first breakup right even though they came in thinking their loss was trumps all losses and no one can compare and don't waste my time if you're in the same room with me talking about some other thing right by day two or three if you can set the environment properly they're going to be crying and hugging that person and rooting for that person and that's the beauty of our stuff so I just if you're listening know that that that is not our groups but you're right people you know when they read my my pamphlet or your pamphlet they don't know that they think oh my gosh yeah this hurt comes to mind but I can't possibly do that work it's going to be all people who you know had a hundred deaths and it's like the worst story.

So I never ever had the same memories you've ever heard and so I won't fit in and like that that will never and has never been the case in our groups and what's just again what is so interesting to me is that you can quickly help people get off of that position even if they if they came there where they're like it has to be a pecking order and I'm I'm that I'm the top I'm the top griever right like they they will get off of that if you can just show them why maybe they should get off of that because everyone And so anyway, yeah, great stuff you bring up. Yeah, and I'm really glad because I agree our groups are very different because we set such a different tone from the beginning. And I was also just going to say I think that's one reason why I really love the grief recovery method though because you're not, you're getting two opportunities.

People come to work through their stuff and they do that and they get completion and they get released from a lot of pain, but they also get a whole set of skills that then allow them to show up for other people well. And I think in our groups, people get to practice those skills and be like, how can I show up for you? Well, how can I say supportive things? How can I be that heart with ears and no mouth, not judging, not comparing, not lifting my knob or putting it down, but just practicing a kind of human or person that I want to be in the world by listening to you and loving you well through your grief, even though it's very different from mine.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. That's great. I'm recalling this happened maybe a month ago or so. I was with my older son, he's 12 and we were, we were at a cash register.

Somebody was checking us out and they were, they were just not being very nice. They were just being very rude. And, you know, and my son after we get through and we're walking away, you know, he commented, that person was not really nice. And I said, you know, they may have got, like the worst news they ever got this morning.

Right? They may have, they may have received some really bad news or lost somebody. But, you know, but it's, it's a gift, I think, for people to, again, this is moving back to the unconventional grief thing. I don't think a lot of people are going to give people that grace because perhaps maybe they had a grief event or maybe they're grieving something from a month ago.

But I love that when you're exposed to this work and you do this work, it's another way to have compassion for people. It's another way to kind of give them some room and be like, man, you know, and going past just like they may have a bad day, like putting yourself in their shoes. Like they probably have 10 to 12 to 15 losses. There's probably a couple giant daggers from those losses and their loss has to be graph.

No one's ever helped them show them what to do with those. And you're just kind of seeing them them in pain. So I think that is, again, something, if we, we kind of had a really cool talk Hannah as well, just like we, we started by day four of our training. We started trying to solve the world's problems.

And as we most would probably agree, the world has a lot of problems. But I think we, you know, all 12 or 15 people in that class were in agreement that is, if everyone just with had some exposure to these tools to the grief recovery method, like you said, not only for your own heart, but because you get skills at how to, how to approach and how to be there for other people. Man, we could solve a lot of social problems just by just being more kind of evolved with like our emotional IQ, right, for a lack of a better word. Absolutely, absolutely.

I think like undoubtedly hands down. And I think that's why I want to make space for more of this unconventional grief, quote unquote, because it allows for a greater awareness of struggles that, you know, a lot of people are having, but no one's talking about. And I think when we are aware that grief comes up with different kinds of life events or experiences, we are just putting more seats around the table and saying, yeah, come up here. Let's talk about it.

Let's work through your pain because your, your grief is valid. And like you said before, like you're grieving that at 100% of your loss. And I want to hear about it. Yeah.

I want to know how to support you. And I want to show up for you because if it's happening for you, it's probably happening to 20 other people I know, but they're just not talking about it. Because they either don't feel safe or society doesn't say that it counts for anything or whatever. I think being the person that says no it counts.

Wow, it'll just be radical for so many people that you know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think this was the definition you used earlier, but if we define grief as the conflicting feelings caused by the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behavior, like think about that, right?

Grief is about anything you're familiar with changing or ending, right? Yeah. Well, with that qualifier, what percentage of the globe have grief? Pretty much everyone who has passed the dawn of conscious memory, right?

So now we're definitely at pandemic levels of a problem that no one really is giving credit to, which is, hey, unresolved grief, which almost everyone on the planet has, is really hurting us. Therefore, we have to go find distractions, right? And those distractions are all the things that we talk about on the nightly news. And all the things we fight against.

And then again, let's extend it out to also, you don't understand my grief is better than your grief. And so my hot button topic is more important than yours. And therefore, I don't even have to respect yours. My frame of reference was harder than your frame of reference.

Therefore, yours is totally negated and canceled out. And then we have just camp after camp fighting on every single topic, when really we can, like you started this off, we can do better. Oh, yeah. Right.

Because it's just boiling it down to like the common human experience of, I lost something that was precious to me, something I loved. And I'm having a really hard time processing that. And I'm in a lot of pain. Can you make space for my pain?

We all understand pain as a human. We all understand pain. Because again, we're all going to go through that. So how can I make more space for your pain and not elevate it one against another?

And then, yeah, I just love this because it's all of the other, other rising, like, well, my pain is greater than your pain or whatever. And it's just not we're just all in it. We're all in it. We're all in it together.

Yeah. Yeah. The 100%. There is a beautiful thing to watch again within two days of working with a complete stranger.

You have a widow, you know, who has lost her husband to a death. And she is passionately lovingly supporting the person who just got a divorce after one year of marriage. Right. And they just are, they're loving each other, supporting each other because they both have 100% heart breaking events for them.

Right. And, and, and, and, uh, if we could just, if we could just get to that more and more, uh, man, it would be cool. So, I agree. Let's, so let's, let's, um, let's shift.

We had other things to talk about. Hannah, do you want to remind me what the other things are? We were going to talk a little bit about, um, we were going to talk about boundaries and grief. Yes.

A lot with people in bound with boundaries. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do that.

Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. You have the floor.

Yeah. We would all. Here's the, here's it is. This is a whole topic and some have boundaries while you're grieving.

It's important. It's good. You can say no. I think, again, going back to something I said earlier about people and the things they say.

I, a common experience I had when my mom died. My mom was a very beloved person in our community. We had a very strong church community. We had a very strong academic community.

She was a principal. And so we had what she touched a lot of community. She's very impactful. And I, a common experience I had was that people were like, Alma would come to me about their grief about my mom.

And I was like, I'm very confused right now. Like, I get that you're grieving. And I think you want to share with me in the grief about this person. But this person is my mom.

And you're like, again, almost elevating your grief a little bit in. Well, but she was, you know, my teacher of this, this, this, and this. And they just, you know, I think having boundaries and grief and being like, Hey, I can't hold that for you right now. I, I can't hold that for you because I'm going through my own thing with this.

I think is so, is so good. I think having boundaries and saying no more often. Like, you don't have to extend yourself. And I would suggest not extending yourself more like the way that you used to pre-loss because grief is exhausting.

You're going through something really, really hard. And so don't try to hold yourself to a standard of activity or performance pre-loss. Because when you're in it, especially in those first few months, when you're in it, you're exhausted. And you're, your body is having a literal physical reaction.

Your nervous system is going through something and trying to, uh, to, to understand or reconcile what's going on. Our brains and topic grief as a traumatic event. So our nervous system is reacting to a trauma and, and responding that way. So we need to be really gentle and easy with ourselves.

Um, and I just do less, right? I just do less say no. And it's okay, even if that person is like, so again, when my mom died, people would be like, I want to come over and I want to bring you food. And, but it was always like, uh, and then I want to sit with you for two hours and just like, you know, really express my thoughts and stuff.

And I'd be like, you can bring me food, but I do not want to talk to you. Like, I didn't say it like that, but it just got like, yeah, but you have to drop it at the door because I don't have it. I don't have to do that. And that is okay.

I think making it okay to just be like, I know my limits right now. And I really, really, really, really have to draw them. Like, it's not about you. This is one of those times where it is actually about you.

And I do really think that boundaries aren't really about other people. They're actually about us and what our own limits and what we can handle and what we can't handle. And it's about knowing yourself. And I just want people to feel, feel okay in that.

Like, I know that actually I feel like it isn't about you. I don't want to talk to you. And so, you know, quite a lot in the media. What right after my mom died, like, Hey, your temptation is going to be to reach out to me.

To text me. To do this, this, this, this, this. I'm going to ask you to not do that. I'm going to ask you just hold that until I'm ready.

Because I'm not ready right now. And people respected it. I mean, I know that people thought it was weird and like, oh dang, but I knew myself. I'll try and hear, talk to anybody other than my husband and my siblings and that's it and their spouses and that's it like I can't So I just think having a strong sense of self and knowing yourself You're already on the back foot You will you're more than that you're knocked down by this this thing I think have realistic expectations with yourself Figure out what you need and then communicate those needs to other people and don't apologize for it because yeah Grief is hard.

Grief is just flat out hard Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a lot to impact there. I know It's interesting. No, that's that's that's why that's why you're here Because I'm you know, I'm like I'm trying to put myself and and kind of where I was when when I when I lost my dad and What I love about working at the Grief Recovery Institute is Again, we give a lot of space to anyone on the team who's in a in a grief event So I had to take a major step back, you know, I couldn't run anything when my dad was dying like I'm and so I Forever free be grateful for our team They really just stepped up and ran the whole thing without me and I had to be kind of like doing my own thing and grieving for a couple of months And I wasn't the expert at grief. I wasn't the president of the grief recovery institute I was just flat out a heartbroken son who lost like a one and a million type dad, you know And luckily like you right I had done quite a bit of self-discovery work on me So I luckily I kind of knew who I was and I knew my strengths my weaknesses I knew where sometimes like for me because I did I I wanted to be alone.

I wanted quite a bit I was surrounded with my family and then I would need to go and hike and be by myself Sometimes I like to like go camping by myself like sometimes I need just solo time But I also know that if I run that too long it's full on isolation and then it's bad, right? So I kind of had played that out enough times in my life to to know hey, you got a really like yeah You intuitively I needed some time alone, but I but I need to I need to really figure out when to come back to a community and Check in and stuff like that and I think like what you're saying is great I guess my only worry would be for a lot of society You know there's not a lot of value these days placed on self-discovery and and and self-work Right, what do we do? We watch reality shows where we judge the shit out of other people and then we feel better about our lives Right and and and that's obviously probably not ideal So I would just caution people that again, it's just never a bad thing to go do a bunch of just know yourself Like you said like I'm glad that you you had already You know done that work to where you you knew what boundaries you needed because you knew who you were and a lot of the time It makes me sad.

I think a lot of people maybe haven't put in that much is because it's not that emphasis It isn't you know asked of us in modern society and so then it's kind of tricky because people don't really understand They don't quite know what they need right and so So again, just personal work personal work to understand like what boundaries Are versus hey, I'm maybe I'm falling into some sticking points and and maybe this isn't best Yeah, no, I actually think that's such a wise and Essential caveat you to draw boundaries well you have to know yourself You have to have done some work to say Okay, like you said like okay. I know this about myself I I want to be alone for X Y's the amount of time But then if I go beyond this point I know I'm isolating and then I'm gonna fall into like some patterns that aren't really gonna serve me right so There is some legwork when it comes to boundaries.

There is some like Intentionality and fortha and I think you know again You practice on the smaller things in life that are like maybe not quite as big of a deal right like Hey, I don't answer my phone after nine o'clock So if you're not gonna text me or I'm not gonna answer my email or whatever right no one's like again Like literally no one has died. So you're not it's not as big of a deal and some in that way We practice with all these micro things or saying no and we know we're tired and stuff So that when the really big things happen like a sudden death or a pet dying or Terminal diagnosis or something so when those big things happen You're like okay, I've exercised this muscle before I can just take a pause and And What what would really serve me right now and I would say for somebody who?

Maybe is listening who is currently grieving or somebody who is you know, I don't know just like okay I want to be more aware of this that is a good practice to instill it's just like taking a pause So instead of just immediately reacting right take a pause take a beat. It's okay to take five minutes To just say okay wait time out and taking some breaths What is it that I really need what would really serve me right now? That is a great way to start you know if you haven't done a lot of Personal work. That's a great way to start.

That's a great way to start It's just ask yourself that question and maybe even play out the scenarios in your mind You know like okay? Well if I do X Y or Z How would that leave me feeling later tonight or tomorrow morning? Okay, how do I want to feel tomorrow? I want to feel energized.

I want to feel rested. I'm already exhausted I think asking yourself some discovery questions can be really helpful I know that when we're grieving we're already exhausted so doing a lot of that work becomes a little bit harder but again, I think Posing or even talking to somebody again who's safe and being like well, what do you think what you know me well What do you think would actually be helpful for me right now? You know, I think having that person there also is like a gauge or a mere reflection Could also just be helpful Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no that's that's great advice And I love that just knowing how to have boundaries around your grief and doing the footwork hopefully before Those big grief events come to kind of understand who you are and what you need and and and You know what you don't need and what doesn't serve you like it's it's always good to be aware of that the other the other thing I wanted to you know when you mentioned boundaries that I really Wanted to talk about too is back to working through some of your unconventional losses in your life Can really help you just in your day-to-day life have boundaries or shift boundaries or change boundaries You know to give you an example a lot of the time we are unresolved with how dad treated mom You know 20 30 years ago and we find ourselves in a in a relationship and we don't know how to set boundaries now because our belief system on how The husband should treat the wife or vice versa was set and we never grieved and completed that so that seems Familiar therefore acceptable where if if you went and did a bunch of grief work to give that back to mom or dad or a combination of both all of a sudden This feels like red alert not okay, and I'm gonna be much more you know much more clear on what my boundaries are because I went and Kind of let go of the stuff that wasn't mine to begin with right and that's the beauty Because again, it's like for probably decades now Everyone's like oh you got to set boundaries and you got to know what your boundaries are and it's like so easy to say But when you have a mountain full of un unresolved emotional stuff from your from your past and and that is skewing What's your belief system versus what mom or dad gave you as a belief system or your teacher or your older siblings?

It's like impossible to understand boundaries, right and that's where Again, you would never really think of grief recovery this method to like oh This can help me with boundaries and absolutely can't but you got to go do some work around You know those things those topics before your these boundaries even make sense or you know where your boundaries are You know, so that's the other aspect of it that I love Yeah, I Love this. I'm so glad you brought it up because it's reminding me of something else I wanted to say earlier about unconventional grief That's why I love the lost history graph portion of the work because I feel like that's where you really start to notice some patterns about yourself Things that you identify that like oh this happened and this really hurt me and then five years later this thing happened again It's kind of similar.

Okay. Now over here this thing happened when I broke up with so and so and so and I reacted this way if you If you really take a step back and look at it you usually can see a common thread or pattern of or belief like you said a Belief system that you've had right. I'm always the rejected one or people always talk over me or I'm always this or I'm always that I Love the lost history graph because Usually brings that up about ourselves it highlights the things that are like oh, I really I really believe this about who I am Like I'm struggling with this and that's why I consider this a grief because when this person did xyz It reinforces this thing that happened back here when I was seven that my dad said to me and I am not over that You know, I I just love How it highlights who we are as a person today and how it like kind of shapes and formulates our beliefs so when we take the time I always tell I always tell my clients is like this is my favorite bar This is my favorite bar.

You're gonna learn so much about yourself because Just plotting out What has hurt you in your life the things that you would say yeah, that caused me grief It's actually also highlighting Different patterns of thought believe things that you've internalized that you didn't even know you were internalizing about yourself About the world about how people treat other people and then when you can see it down on paper You can say whoa wait a second. Okay Do I really believe that and how do I want to show up now that I'm like challenging this thought or this belief and that's again I think what you're also saying with this boundary work is okay, wait a second I do need to process this and I do need to have better boundaries with so and so because I know feeling rejected is A trigger or a stimulus for me because of these griefs that I've had so I need to be mindful about this and it's just something That's again just gonna help you become a more self-aware person and that's why again Why I think everybody should do the work but I love the loss of straggraft portion because yeah, it's self education Yeah, that's that's exactly right.

That's where I found a lot of patterns that I needed to become aware of and Is through the loss of straggraft so you're absolutely right and if you're listening and you've been through the grief recovery method This is your loving reminder to just do more work, right? One of the one of the bummers for me is there's quite a few people that go through the method and they're like Oh, that was helpful and they and they kind of had the one loss they identified that they wanted to work on and I think sometimes we don't We don't kind of nurture them along enough to let them know no this can be a tool like you can use repeatedly for the rest of your life like Go do other relationships go do other letters like I am so grateful that I didn't just stop at one Relationship doing this method right I I Am the person I am because of the the the culmination of many many different graphs and letters and all the work on different Relationships throughout my life So gentle reminder if you're listening and you're you know the the method has been beneficial keep doing the work And if if you're interested at all and you haven't done this work look like get in touch with Hannah Get in touch with us because I think you'll really find comfort in in working through this method You know with somebody that's there to help you Hannah you are Incredible, I can't believe we're at an hour.

I'm definitely having you back Where you work and people find you and how can they get in touch with you if they want to work with you or talk to you or that good stuff Absolutely So people can find me on Instagram and TikTok under the handle stay royal queen That's awesome. I know it's a long story. That's all we'll talk about that another time Alright, yeah, the stay royal queen or they is the handle But people can go to www.hannawactor.com my last name is confusing WACHT are Hannah Wactor and yeah, and they can just ping me there and book a connection call with me and I would just Be so honored to hear their heart I I love this work call and I'm just so grateful for your dad and For Russell just making this possible because it is life life changing It's changed my life for the better and And because of that I get to be a little changemaker wherever I am in the communities I'm part of just continually educating and living on people And so I would agree just the best thing is do the work and it doesn't have to be with me or Cole There's plenty of other specialists out there.

I think it's you know, just like any other counselor find one that speaks to your heart And connect with them because you're sharing just so intimately, but it's fantastic work And I love it. So yeah, yeah No, thank you. Thank you. I'm so glad that I that I got to be a part of your training and and meet you personally You know, it was a real gift so All right, well, I'm excited to have you back You have a great rest of your day and if for everyone listening Thank you for listening make sure you subscribe make sure you leave a review Make sure you share this with people that you think could benefit from kind of the wisdom that Hannah dropped today So anyway Feel free again podcast.

Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time