Why “Time Heals” Is a Lie: The 2 Ways We Handle Grief (And Why One Keeps You Stuck) feat. Kelli Sheumaker

So Kelly, what discussed the first topic we want to talk about today? Yeah, I think I really want to talk about how grief can, can show up or you can deal with grief in two different, completely different ways. You know, the first way is kind of ignoring it, pushing it down, even blaming everybody else for the pain. And sometimes I want to be careful there because sometimes it is somebody else's fault.

They caused the grief. So sometimes it is. But I think what I'm talking about is the grief that we get stuck in. When we get stuck in that grief, I will be honest, when my mom died, I was stuck in that grief for three years.

I didn't know what to do with it. You know, I had really nice people telling me, you know, just, just, you know, it will go away. Time will heal it. And we know that that's not true, you know.

And I remember showing up to church in the pastor saying, you just have to have joy. And I'm like, how? How do I have joy? What do I do with this pain?

It hurts. And so I was under the oppression that something was wrong with me that I couldn't deal with my grief. So I must have been messed up in the head. You know, I must have, I couldn't know, I didn't know what to do where to go.

How do you feel it? As it progresses, because it was three years before I found the grief recovery method, actually, I'm like, well, something's wrong with me. If I, it's taking me this long, you know, my mom died, I should just be okay. Yep.

And I got stuck. And I think we, you know, I think it's just one of those things we get. We have a tendency to go, okay, that's grief. If I ignore it, it will go away.

If I don't deal with it, it will go away because that's just life and everybody has grief. So, you know, you just ignore it and it goes away. But unfortunately, we get stuck with that. And for me, not only the pain was still there, but anger.

It came out as anger over co-workers, over family members, over stuff that wasn't really have anything to do with my grief. So I didn't know what it was. Yeah. Well, yeah.

And Kelly, thank you. And put me in that camp too. Without the grief recovery method tools, that is exactly how I deal with grief as well. Stuff it down, pretend it didn't happen.

Don't think about it, distract with other things, and eventually just like the memories will fade and I'll just be happy again later on. Right. Right. Like, that is the roadmap for a lot of us.

So I just wanted to say, I can relate to that. I have, that's how I grieve without these tools. And sometimes if I'm being stubborn even with these tools, I want to not look at it. I want to not address it, right?

As if that worked for me in the past, right? That's a, that's a good thing you bring up. So, so we have that type of person, right, who deals with the grief that way. What's the, what's the kind of the other side or what, what's the other way that you see people deal with grief?

Absolutely. The other way is to acknowledge it. They're like, you know, my heart is broken. I'm in pain.

This hurts. But I don't want to get stuck. I don't want to live. I don't want this to be my new normal because often we say that's your new normal, you know, you had someone die in your life.

That's your new normal. You have a chronic illness. That's your new normal. But the other way is for not staying there to say, you know what, I need to move on from there.

And it really is about finding a safe place and tools to help you identify that and to move on and to heal that hurt that just keeps coming up. And I think that's why for me, the grief recovery method was so right on for me is because it gave me that place to talk to someone in a safe environment. So I felt heard, I felt that my pain was, you know, I could identify it even if it sounded crazy, you know, even if I was blaming other people for my pain, you know, I could be safe in acknowledging that pain and then moving forward and having tools to, okay, what do I do with this pain now? Where do I go from here?

And the blessing, the blessing of that is that you don't get stuck. You can move on and then you can find that hope again in life. You can find that, you can find joy in life. You can find excitement.

You're not just stuck in that new normal. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's finding strength to move on and you build character. It actually, to go through the, the steps of the grief recovery method is really to heal your heart and you actually grow so much in character. And so that's what's so exciting is not to stay there and feel like, oh my gosh, this life is miserable and I can never find hope again.

But to go, oh, this, this is painful and it hurts to go through it. On the other side of that is this amazing excitement about life again. Yeah. You know, and I've had the privilege of taking a couple people that have lost their spouses, find this amazing hope and see them get remarried.

I mean, and just see the joy in their hearts, you know, because it's, they didn't get stuck. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've seen that with, with people who have lost children too, right? And when they first, when they first came to this work, it would, it was unfathomable for them to consider having another child or to, to go down that route because the pain was so deep, right?

And through the, the steps of grief recovery and through them taking these courageous actions, I've seen them have other children, right? And, and, and start, restart families and, you know, and, and all of that. And so I, yeah, I've seen it with all different types of losses because you're right. And the alternative is if we're, if we're, if we're working so hard to keep that pain bottled up, it's, it's, it's almost impossible to move forward.

It's, it's almost impossible to, to even believe that you have choice, right? That's what Lois Hall used to say all the time, right? Is unresolved grief, robs us of choice, right? Right.

Right. Want to hear beautiful gifts in doing this work is reminding ourselves and seeing and gaining, regaining clarity on, oh, I, I do have a lot of choice, right? And when we're in the fog of grief, that, that sounds impossible, right? Right.

Right. But that's, that's another piece of this, I think, as well. But no, please continue. I love what you're, where you're going with this.

No, and, you know, one of the things you just said, it reminds me that sometimes what I would do is, is blame other people or, you know, this, this pain, this grief is caused some, and like I said, sometimes it is. But when you get, the interesting thing is I've done the method on so many different relationships and people and, and things in my life that I realize some of them, it's kind of funny that I get, I'm working on the method and I'm like, you know what, they really weren't that mean to me. You know, I took it, I mean, so it's really, they didn't cause anything. They made have had a bad day or whatever, but I took it so internally because I was in pain already.

So sometimes when your heart is broken, anything, a reaction from anyone, sometimes can be even, even deeper cut in your heart. And so you think that, you know, well, they're mean to me or they've done this to me. And I've realized that sometimes no, and just taking responsibility, we talk about just taking one percent responsibility for our healing. It's not responsibility that they hurt us.

It's, it's taking responsibility. You know what, I'm going to take a couple steps. All steps forward to healing. And it's amazing to find out that, you know what, that doesn't, I, they may not have done anything to really hurt me.

I just took it the wrong way. Sometimes that happens. Yeah, yeah. And that's, you know, and the thing I love about the relationship graph, because that's where a lot of this comes alive for people is, I know for me, before grief or recovery, I would straight up literally, if I was angry at the person and lost them, I would, I would put, I would push them down, you know, and I would literally just pride myself on how, how little I could think about them, right?

But like you said, what was happening was, yeah, I wasn't thinking about them, because the minute they entered my mind, I went to anger, right? So I was just, I was just angry. But I thought I was doing so good because I wasn't giving them the time of day and they, I was pretending like they, and their loss didn't exist anymore. And that was really painful.

What the relationship graph did though, because what happens is if we avoid, avoid, avoid grief, then our memories, our perception of the relationship, that all gets really skewed. And so if we're unfinished with the painful angry parts of the relationship, that's all we can see. And so what we do in grief recovery and kind of what Kelly's talking about is, we look at, we look at one of our actions as we look at the relationship graph. And yes, like you are, you are free to find all the below the line painful hurtful stuff, but we are also trying to really find truth and accuracy and an accurate memory picture of this person.

So we guide you and suggest, hey, look for the happy, look for the good times, look for the stuff they did nice to you. Look at the stuff you did for them. And then what that does often, not always, but often that will really humanize people and it will allow your brain and your heart to actually find all these really beautiful pieces of the relationship. And so that can happen too.

I mean, Kelly's kind of talking about an extremer. She's like, you know, through reviewing this, I realize they actually didn't do anything wrong. That can happen. Another thing that can happen is, you know, we validate the wrong stuff and we have a safe place to do something with that painful stuff.

And then we also find, wow, this person was way more awesome than I gave him credit for. And that's a real bonus when it happens to be your father or your brother, you know, or your husband. You know, it's cool when you actually can humanize the person again and be like, yeah, that stuff was valid, that hurt. I know what to do with that stuff.

I know how to complete that stuff. And then I also now have access to a bunch of memories I was not willing to look at or my brain wasn't even willing to let me go to. And now I see, oh, wow, this is a really cool person here too. And this is a relationship worth investing in or, you know, or rekindling or, you know, whatever.

The opposite, which is, man, you asked me to find two above the lines and I had to work for two hours to find two. And one of them was I was clothed and one of them was, you know, every now and again, I got food. And I don't want this person in my life and I kept trying to go back to them. And now finally through a group of recovery, my clarity is for the safety of me and my family, I can't keep going back to that person at all.

So again, the outcome can be very different, but the beauty of this work is that when we take ownership to review a relationship and when we have the tools to actually accurately review that relationship, what we find is often the relationship is way different than we felt like it was after years of just pushing that loss down or pushing that hurt down or, you know, so anyway, it's hard to describe this stuff on a point. So we're going to do a podcast. We really prefer you guys just go out and get the book, do it with a friend, find a specialist, do the work. This will make a lot more sense if you just get into some action in doing this.

And again, I don't like to make promises and agree for recovery, but I've never had somebody reply to me. I took all the actions and what a waste of time. And man, I'm bummed that I did that. I've never seen that.

Right. Right. You know, the greatest thing about the method too is that it's not just for loss of someone that has died. You know, it's in any relationship.

One of my trainers, she said, I do it on my husband. And you know, it's like, yeah. So I've done the work on my husband, my daughter, and I have a great relationship with them. But what happens is that sometimes, you know, because we're all human, we all do stupid things.

We all hurt people. We don't mean to. Sometimes we do, but most of the time we don't mean to hurt people. But that hurt, if we don't deal with it, it becomes bitterness and it takes over our entire life.

You know, it can take, it takes, may take years to, but it does creep into areas of our other, you know, our, the good stuff in our life. So it's, it's really important to, that's a great thing about this. You learn the tool and you can use it for any relationship, any grief that we have, but also a relationship to keep it healthy. Yes.

To work on those things that cause, you know, grief is just something that causes a loss that causes, yeah, I lost my words here. Not good. But it's anything that causes a change in our relationship with them. So, you know, you get in an argument that changes your relationship a little bit, even if it's just for that time.

But that bitterness can grow if you don't deal with what you guys were angry about. Yes. Yeah, that, that is the thing that's so hard to market around this work, right, is you really can work on any relationship with anyone living or someone who has died and you don't need to equate it with this is a good relationship or a bad relationship. It's simply a human relationship, therefore, because relationships change sometimes on a day to day basis.

We accumulate grief. We accumulate grief in living relationships. We accumulate grief in marriages. We accumulate grief in raising children.

We accumulate grief as being adult children to our parents, right? Absolutely. There is grief in all of these relationships and like what Kelly is talking about is before you find grief recovery or some other tool, you know, most of our plans are stuff it down, pretend it didn't happen, minimize it, you know, intellectualize it, have some reason why you know they did it, you know, and none of that, none of that is helpful to the heart, right? The heart, meat wants to say in this and I want to say this too, like in my marriage specifically, right, Ashley, who I've, you know, I've basically loved since we were in ninth grade.

We didn't get together officially until later on. I had to convince her. I fooled her into thinking I had become more sophisticated in college and she fell for it. But, but anyway, you know, yes, she does stuff sometimes in our relationship that hurts, that I would be like, that's you, that's your fault, that was hurtful, right?

And that's all true. The other thing that I have to really keep in check in marriage is this other thing we teach on, which is expectations equal plan disappointments, right? And one of the beautiful things about grief recovery for me was learning, hey buddy, maybe your expectations are a little bit cray cray. And maybe you need to get that in check because she didn't get the memo on your expectations, right?

That's often, often we just create these wild fantasy expectations in our head about what that other person is going to be, but they don't get the memo. We don't even bother disclosing or letting them know the expectations. Or maybe we do let them know and they're like, well, that's not really what I'm trying to be or whatever. But again, such a beautiful tool for working on marriages, such a beautiful tool because again, you get to look at it accurately.

Yes, the other person has a part, but guess what? You have a part two. And guess what? You have choice.

And all of those things may have felt unavailable to you when we just have a broken heart over some past stuff in the relationship. And the stuff that unfinished, the stuff we're angry about, it takes up all the space in our mind. So you forget about the person you fell in love with, right? You forget about the person that you met in ninth grade and all the happy stuff because you're so stuck on bottling up the pain or the painful thing, right?

And again, for me or you, there's no surprise why we have the divorce rate we do in this country. Because on day one of dating, this person that ends up being our wife or a husband, you're coming in with a backpack full of unresolved stuff from your past relationships, too. And we don't want to talk about that as a society either, right? But it's like, that's a tough plan.

You also have your own expectations of what that marriage and what that person's going to be for you, do for you what your life is going to be. So you have these expectations. Yes. And it's a great, you're talking about the backpack and what happens is you have all these great memories, right?

They get smushed down by the pain. Pain actually, you know, we, when we're hard is so much pain, you forget about all the good things that have happened in your life with that person are just in general in your life. And the only way to kind of see those memories again, those feelings, all that good stuff that's in you, in the world, in the other person is to get that heart pain out of that backpack or, you know, it's kind of like another way it's saying it is sometimes our heart is, is I just imagine our heart being just twist, all these things are twisted in our heart and it's gray and it's, you know, it's painful. You need to get that stuff up off out of your heart so that your heart is, is, is being able to be filled by other people, you can share your heart with other people.

You can't do that if your heart is full of this, this grief that's just in there and that's ugly and it's, it's just gray and it's swirling all around your heart. If you don't get that out, you can't give your heart to someone else. You can't receive other people's heart because there's no room in your heart. It's just full of all that pain.

Yes, yes. And that's kind of the other thing, Kelly, that we wanted to cover in this, in this podcast, right? Is sometimes I've seen the motive, look, whatever motivation you have to get to agree for cover, good on you. Like, you know, again, as long as you're sitting in the chair taking the actions, I, I don't really mind why you're doing it, right?

But the gift really is like the gift we want to give to you if we were helping you with grief for cover is giving you these tools. And then we hope you can share them far and wide with your friends and family and all that, right? But again, we want to help you. What I mean by that is sometimes the motivation, you know, to a grieving mom is I want to, I want to know how to help my kids, great sitting this chair, right?

They're not even focused on their heart, right? They've been married for, you know, 30 years and they love this guy with all their heart and he died, but everyone told them to be strong. So all they're focused on is helping their children, right? And, and so if that is, if that's what motivates that, that, that would out of come in, that, that's fine.

Sometimes, you know, I'll see people who are it's like, yeah, you know, my, my husband or my wife really responded to this work and I read about it. And it sounds great. And, but, you know, I kind of feel like they're there for their wife or their husband. And it's like, great, you know, as long as you're not being dragged in, resistently.

Right, right. We're fine with it. There's some inkling that you're just kind of doing it for someone else in your life because it was important to them. That's fine too.

Again, people come in here with different motivations and that's fine. But another motivation, and I think sometimes this happens when we talk about it on social media is, do you know how many people sadly I've worked with where they're, they were working on, you know, graphing and working on their relationship with the living parent? But, but the sadness was they never felt like they were truly there for them because that parent had another loss, you know, maybe maybe a sibling of theirs died. And then mom and dad, again, without any tools, this is heartbreaking and this isn't like an attack on anyone.

But without any tools, our best tools were, I'm just going to stuff it down and pretend that it didn't happen or I just can't think about it and I'm just going to move on in time, we'll heal it. And unfortunately, we work often with the adult children who were the other siblings in this household that had to grow up with a mom who had, you know, her heart was in a thousand pieces for the rest of their childhood, right? And so grief can really have a ripple effect and really hurt those around you. And so sometimes the motivation could be that.

It's just like, look, as a dad, if I have a bunch of unresolved grief, I'm going to be angry. I know that's how I cover my sadness. Well, I don't want my kids to walk around on eggshells their whole childhood because I don't know what to do with my grief. So if my motivation is just, hey, I want to be a softer, more loving dad, get your butt in the seat.

Right. You know, if you are a wife and at times maybe you're having to realize your expectations for this man were a little out of whack and yeah, he does some messed up stuff, but also my expectations were a little bit wild, you know, and I want to be, you know, I want this relationship to have less turbulence in it, you know, maybe that's the motivation. Like whatever the motivation is, sit, you know, to get in the seat, go for it, but make no mistake, your unresolved grief is affecting people all around you on a day to day basis, whether you want to admit that or not. And again, sometimes that is hard to hear because you're like, you know, I can almost hear someone screaming at me, you know, at the podcast, it's like, cool, this loss that I had, I didn't want it, it wasn't fair.

No one could even imagine it. It's horrible. You know, and all that stuff is true. And you're telling me I have to look at this or my grief is going to hurt other people.

And it's like, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that is what we see time and time again is, you know, we don't want these losses that happen to us, right? I mean, I didn't want to lose my dad. I didn't want to carry him from the bed to the bathroom because he had no strength to do that. I didn't want to hear, you know, like I didn't, I didn't sign up for any of that, right?

But after that loss, right, it is, and this feels really unfair still, but it is my responsibility for what I'm going to do to move forward from this loss. Yeah. You know, is this loss going to cripple my heart forever? Is it going to callus me?

Am I going to have to wear body armor or not let anyone really in close because I got to protect my heart from that ever happening again? Or do I need to find some tools so that I can work through that and still have an open heart to all my friends and family and to my children and to my wife? Or do I need to be callus and protected and I don't have choice, right? These are the type of things that Grief or Carvey give back to people is you have a choice in that, you know what I mean?

And so that stuff is all very hard again to communicate on a landing page or on the front cover of a book. I'm excited to announce our premium in-person certification training, individuals who have a desire to help other people with grief and loss, join us for a four day event that you will remember forever. This is based on the proven four day certification we've done before. The curriculum is the same, but now you're going to get a ton of stories and education and training from Sandy.

These are tangible tools that help people in any area of their life. You're going to get a ton of stories and education and training from me. We will have double the amount of trainers to answer questions you have. We want to help people find this missing information, this missing link.

I'm an advocate for the grieving process because I know that's like why would you not tell somebody to heal? There's going to be some tears in there, there's going to be some tissues, but I think what will surprise people that are considering this training is if you sat outside of the room when this training is happening, you wouldn't believe how much laughter is happening in this training. You wouldn't believe how much joy and hope you can see on people's faces as we're breaking and people are coming out of the room. It's everything.

And she was saying, made me feel seen and normal and validated and not insane. I saw grief as this really bad dark thing instead of seeing it as the actual healing process. As someone who's been in this field for 15 years now, I would have loved to have been trained under these circumstances. It's just such a premier training.

You're going to probably walk away with some like lifelong friends. We did not want to say goodbye to each other at that end of that four days. And be able to help walk them through that and give them that same light bulb that came on in my head. And it was transformative.

It was such a rich time of learning and engaging, listening to people's stories, being present, being focused with who you're talking to, was such a big part of the grief recovery work. I had done a lot of things. I had done coaching. I'd been in therapy.

I had done a lot of other modalities and they were helpful. But when I did the grief recovery method and when I walked through the method and continued to use the tools, life began to have color. I went from being very emotionally disconnected to being very connected. Do not wait.

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Have a great day. Absolutely. The other thing that affects us, it doesn't just affect the people around us, but it affects us because your heart is broken and you think, oh, well, it's just my heart. You know, it's just my emotions, but it affects our physical body.

It affects spiritually. It actually so often, it will cause, you know, physical things, migraines, stomach ulcers. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune after my mom died, but it physically, because our body is physically saying, hey, knock, knock, knock, something's wrong. Fix your heart.

And we get so tired because we push it down so often and our bodies are like, I can't deal with this anymore. I'm going to break down physically. I had a, it was my first client, actually, my pilot. And her father died five years before and her heart was broken and she was, she started the grief recovery method and her high blood pressure was rising and they gave her all the meds and that's the med medications didn't work and she finished her letter and her blood pressure went down.

Now, I'm not saying that about everybody, but it's how we hold our grief. Everybody holds it differently in our physical bodies. You know, sometimes we hold it and we're, and if you can't see it, if you're not watching the video and you're holding your neck tight and your shoulders and your scrunching can cause migraines. It can cause other things, you know, going on.

So you need to look at this and go, you know, what's going on with my physical body? Is this affecting my physical body and by not sleeping? I mean, that's a big one. Am I not sleeping?

And that's going to cause your physical body. So it often can not just affect people around us, but it can internally affect our physical being. And often we go to a doctor's and they just give us medications when it may not help. Because it's actually the stuff inside of us, the grief, our heart is broken that we need to fix.

Yeah. And we have had, we have had doctors of many sorts in certification trainings and when we covered that part in the training about how unresolved grief really does affect our health. We have had doctors of all sorts nodding in agreement that, and we're, again, we're not saying that grief is 100% responsible for heart disease or cancer, but what we do see and what we do believe is that grief creates a really, really nice environment for things to thrive in the body, right? That's what I would say is unresolved grief can make a very, very, very inviting environment for these different things.

And I even had a wonderful lady the other day in one of my trainings and she was like, well, we want to be careful and to not view it as an attack on us. Like, oh, I brought this on and I was like, no, no, no, that's what we're trying to do. What we are trying to do though is because the society won't tell you that pharmaceutical companies don't want to tell you that. The doctors don't want to tell you that.

They don't want you to at least look at, hey, how much unresolved emotional pain have you been holding on for 40, 50 years? Right. We're just saying, let's just look at that because we see people who physically look different after doing one relationship in the grief recovery method literally look physically different, right? And we're not talking about doing 20 or 30 or 40 losses like Kelly or me or other people who have really taken these tools to another level.

We're talking about people where we're like, we met them on Friday and they've gone through the method very quickly and by Sunday they look different, you know, and it's like, you either don't believe me right now or that sounds crazy. But if you look at Kelly on the video, she's nodding. If I was talking to other specialists, they'd be nodding too. In very short order people will physically look different.

And again, our goofy analogy is, yeah, when the backpack gets less heavy, people feel more grief. They can. They stand up more. They can smile more, right?

They can reach out and make new friendships where before they were closed off to even that idea. Like, you know, these are the type of thing. Like a lot of the time with unresolved grief, I don't even know naturally if you're an introvert or an extrovert until I've seen you do some grief recovery work because I've seen so many people that are quote unquote introverted, you know, and it's like, oh no, they just were holding on to a lot of grief. You know, and then there are other people who are just naturally introverted people and you know, that's not the case.

But again, a lot of the time when I see people and they're like, I'm introverted, right? Like there could be some truth to that for sure. But I've seen a lot of people with overwhelming grief from the past and that term just fits them. But it's more about wearing that code of grief, right?

And just protecting yourself. Yes. Thank you. Yeah.

And so again, this is an adjudgment on introvert or extroverts. It's just like, is that accurate or is that grief from your past? Right. Right.

Right. Right. And so that, no, it's a fascinating conversation and you're totally right. Unresolved grief affects your body.

It affects your health. It affects how you show up for the world. And again, it does affect your relationships and the people who are in relationships with you. And so it's, again, it's very important that we look at this stuff and we don't simply believe the lie that time will just heal it alone with no action required from us.

And you know, look, we're not the only game in town. If there's some other action that you're taking, that's great, right? But the point is, is we, around grief and around emotional pain, we want you looking at taking action and accepting, accepting responsibility, at least one percent on how you're going to move forward. Right.

Right. From this event, not that, not that you cause that event, not that that you wanted that event. None of that, we're not, we're not saying that. We're just saying, at some point, we've got to shift into looking at responsibility for how we're going to move forward.

Right. You know, grief is normal and natural and we say that, but it's also, you don't want to stay like we said, we don't want to get stuck in that normal, natural feeling pain all the time. It's moving forward. And like you said, the grief recovery method, or if you have some other way to take those steps in a, in a safe environment where you can take small steps to, to get through that pain.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and again, I always, I always think about, you know, the past and how we were designed and we don't have time for that whole rabbit hole. But what I will say is this, I think it's safe to say that we have never had more distractions from our emotional pain than ever before.

So you know, if you go back to the times when we were all like living in, in caves and very connected to nature and in the moment a lot because being out of the moment would, you know, have some saber to tiger get you. I got to believe that when grief occurred, right, there was this more visceral process because it was like, like what else did you have to do? You know, I mean, yes, you could stay busy by hunting and gathering, I guess, but you know, there were also, probably a lot of times where self-reflection was going to happen because you didn't have as much stimulus as you have now. Right.

Where nowadays, right, it is, I don't want to say easy, but it is possible to distract yourself almost every waking moment. And really do nothing with that grief event or with that loss, right? And you know, for most of us like shelter is going to happen and food is going to happen. Somehow our needs will be met to where we can really distract for long periods of time around our grief, right?

And that's a trap from, I think what you've seen or what I've seen is if we just keep distracting and not looking at it at all, months go by, years go by. But we never get the call like at the five year or the ten year mark where we were like, I was going to sign up for your class, but it was the five years did it. I'm totally good. I'm living happy and free again.

It was just time. It took five years for me to heal from this loss. Like, I've never heard that ever, right? But I have heard, hey, this loss was 20 years ago.

Can I still sign up for your weekend workshop? I'm ready to do this work. You know, this loss happened 10 years ago. I couldn't date again, right?

I couldn't even open my heart to another relationship. And it's been five years. Do you think this could help me? I mean, those are the things I hear.

I do not hear, yeah, you know, 10 years did it. The ten year mark was all good. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. Well, another thing that I kind of want to talk about is people with chronic illness, I had a traumatic brain injury and I was diagnosed with a bunch of autoimmune. This gets frustrating sometimes, but you can use the grief recovery method for that. But I want to say that those things, because they're chronic, they don't just disappear.

The pain doesn't disappear. You know, the grief recovery method doesn't just fix the pain. Right. But there's a lot of loss in, man, I had an expectation that my life was going to be like this.

You know, I was going to be able to do this job. I was going to be able to be here. I was, you know, I'm going to be able to be at this, you know, my friends having a party. I'm going to be able to go there, you know, or whatever it is.

And you have to cancel a lot of plans because of health or, you know, there's a lot in that. There's a lot of loss in connection to community, if you're always, you know, not home or, or, wow, you look fine. There's nothing wrong with you. We get a lot of that.

So the method really helps dealing with those things. It doesn't heal the illness per se, but it can help, you know, you process it and go, you know what, I'm not going to, I'm not going to beat myself up. You know, I'm not going to, I pick on my body, you know, it's, it's, you know, I'm not going to get second going, God, life is miserable because I have this. Yes, there's days that are miserable.

But I can take steps forward to go, you know what, today's a great day. And I can be happy with that. I did work on, it sounds weird, but on my body because I get mad. Why are you doing this to me?

Why am I not being able to, you know, go out today because I have, you know, can barely move or whatever the pain is. You know, the pain may not lessen, but it's, I'm able to accept it more. I'm able to move forward. But also I have the tools on those days that just are really bad to go, you know what, I've got to work on this again.

I've got to do, because I'm mad. I'm angry. And I get it out so that it doesn't stay, you know, it's not a part of me. I don't walk around angry every day.

Yes, yes. A place where I sometimes see this is when we have moms or dads who are working on, you know, different, again, living relationships, a child who is, you know, not very high functioning autistic child, right? And they come to agree for recovery and they, you know, identify, I had a hope and a dream and an expectation, you know, that I was going to have a healthy, you know, quote unquote, normal by today's standards, you know, pregnancy and then baby. And I had all these expectations of what my child would be.

And I want to agree for recovery work around that because I'm seeing that I, those expectations are not going to be met, right? And I love this, I love this, this baby, this child with, with all my heart. I'm also very angry at the hope streams and expectations that won't be there. And what a gut-wrenching, you know, thing to deal with.

And through grief recovery, we get to help that individual with hope streams and expectations. We get to get, say goodbye to the unfinished things, the things we wish we could have been different, better, more, you know, all those kind of things. And the next day, they are a full-time caretaker for this child who is struggling with, right? And so, like you said, with grief recovery, right, we're not always promising, hey, you do grief recovery and then, you know, life doesn't happen or life isn't difficult or things aren't frustrating, right?

Very often, I mean, we can, we can do grief recovery where it was like grief recovery helped me not divorce this person. And now it's a day-to-day struggle for us to still get on the right track, right? Or grief recovery showed me that we can't be together. Or grief recovery showed me, we're actually way better than we thought.

So, again, the outcome is different for each individual, but a lot of the time after grief recovery, we still have a very difficult challenge in a relationship or, you know, in the loss that we worked on. You work on your health and then the next day, your body is still, how's it saying what's going on, right? Absolutely. I mean, just like you're talking about the kids, for me, it's like, I had a traumatic brain injury.

You think, okay, and back then, because it was back in the 90s, they said, okay, go home. And every year, not every year, but, you know, every few years, it's like, oh, now this is happening, and it's because of the head injury. You know, for the parents that have a kid with a disability, it's like, okay, we've gotten used to this part of it, and they grow up and something else happens. It's like, oh, now there's another thing, you know, just, and it's hard because it's like, all of a sudden, like, for me, I had to have next surgery that happened because of my head injury.

You know, and then it's like, oh, now this is happening. You know, and so it's not one and done with a grief recovery method. And it's not even, yeah, go ahead. No, I just really quickly want to say what we prefer is that we go and do the relationship graph and the other completion work on the totality of the relationship, either the relationship with my body and my health or the relationship with this child who is autistic, and we do a massive amount of all of the work around the hope streams and expectations.

And then we start applying day-to-day tools of grief recovery, and those day-to-day tools can be way more helpful, but we have to go start with the core loss first. So in other words, I would never introduce day-to-day grief recovery tools to someone who hasn't done the initial work on that grief, because if you try to apply the day-to-day tools, but you haven't done the front end work, the stimulus will still be so highly charged, right, the trigger, the hurt. When this person lets us down on the expectation we had, or we had this expectation, they were going to take this turn in their reading or their communication, and then they don't. And we were so attached emotionally to them taking that turn in this educational piece, and that was going to solve everything.

Right. That was what we were attached to. Well, if we're not, if we haven't completed the emotional work in the start, that charge is still going to be 190%, right. It's still going to be gut-wrenching versus us going and really reducing the charge, the stimulus, the trigger from grief recovery work on kind of the initial thing.

Right. Right. So I just want to mention that. You know, there is day-to-day tools that are beautiful, but you've got to go do the work.

Absolutely, but once you do that work and you have that work, the day-to-day is easier. If you keep up with it, it's like, you know, you know, today is a tough day. I'm going to do some work. And then it's better.

You know, and it's, I just don't want people to think that it's just like one and done. We have tools that you can to work on this, because our hearts don't just, it's just not like you're healed, right away. Your heart is, is, was broken, and now it's better. But it's, it's amazing how much, if you do the core work first, like you said, it's like, wow, my heart is healing.

And then the day-to-day stuff is just maintenance. It just helps keep it, to keep your heart healed. And to keep it, you know, available and to keep you from not blocking off other people because your heart is hurting. Yeah.

And, you know, and I also, like my dad used to say this, he's like, hey, you know, because present moment is a skill that we really harp upon and grief recovery. And, and lack of being in the moment is one of the symptoms of grieving, right? And so it's, it's not uncommon for us to work with people who are very out of the moment. And through grief recovery, you can, you can get that back.

And then kind of like where we started today, when you do the relationship graph, and, and you, you, you have the safety to really go to the deep core sad parts. It also frees up your heart and your mind to go to the happy parts too. And I find that as well as like you were saying, if you go do the core work, your day-to-day tools will be more helpful. The other thing I think you will find too is you'll find a lot more beauty in the day-to-day.

You'll find more beauty in that relationship. You'll find more gratitude. You'll find more of the stuff you appreciate, you know, and, and for a mom who's dealing with a really difficult relationship with a child that, that, you know, there's just a lot of challenges on a day-to-day basis. Those gifts, that gratitude, those in the moment moments where there's beauty and there's love and there's, you know, all these amazing things.

Like, what could be more important for that mom to have access to that again too and not be so hurt over the things we wish could have been different. And it's very easy to be stuck there, you know. And so if we can help that person complete a lot of that, there's a lot more joy to be found in our day-to-day. When you're actually, when we're in that, when we're in the moment and we're not stuck on what could have been or I wish it would have been this way or I, you know, those kind of things.

Well, we're talking about this tough stuff. This is a tough part of grief for every work, you know, is when we're working sometimes on these living relationships where again, do a bunch of beautiful works to complete what was, you know, in the past. And then the next day, there's new stuff coming up, you know. But we don't talk about this that often, right?

I think that most people assume when they're doing grief recovery, there's a finality there. You know, there's finality in a death or there's a finality in a divorce. But that's not the case for a lot of people. A lot of people are doing grief recovery work where it's like, I'm working to get complete with today and the past so that I can have a new tomorrow with this person, you know, no matter what the relationship is.

Maybe it's me trying to repair my relationship with a parent, you know, maybe it's me trying to repair my relationship with a living adult child of mine, you know, or again, a marriage or so the list goes on on the beautiful ways that that relationships are healed and mended by this work. But again, we've got to get complete with the past or we're going to that's going to be our future as well. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, no, these are great topics. I'm so glad that you brought them up, Kelly. We are at the 45-minute mark, which is crazy. But let's let's work in people, find you, how can they work with you, how does that all work for you, Kelly?

Yeah, well, you can find me at renewedhopegriefrecovery.com. And I'm online. I work online with everybody. So, you know, you can find me there at renewedhopegriefrecovery.

I also have a podcast to help people with tools and to have people in its renewed hope after loss. Nice. Okay. Great.

So we'll link to all of that. And, you know, again, if this is interesting to you or if there's something that I said or Kelly said and you're like, well, this kind of makes a little sense, reach out to Kelly. Work with Kelly. Trust me.

Even if you don't know what the loss is that you're going to work on, we can help you find one. You know, here is the reality. Every single human being listening to this podcast, everybody in this office building I'm in and, you know, everyone in a 500 square mile radius of Kelly, we all have unresolved loss from the past that we can work on. Right.

We've all had that plan to stuff it down and just keep moving forward and don't look at it and oh, this hurts. I got to distract from looking at it or it's bubbling up. So I got to go find something else to do. Like that has been most of our plans for our entire lives, you know, and it doesn't have to be that way.

You have other options. You have other choices. One of them is griefrecovery, you know, and again, we will help you. And I think you'll be very, very surprised that at the results you can get if you can take these tools and apply them to your heart.

So again, Kelly, thank you so much for being on. Thank you for these great topics. I think it's so important to talk about these topics and that's why we have this podcast because it's really hard to describe griefrecovery on the cover of a book. It goes so deep.

It's so simple and accessible, but it goes very deep and it's very nuanced at the same time, right? And we were committed to showing people all of the different ways you can use griefrecovery because it continues to amaze me, Kelly, other people that do this work. It continually amazes us on all the things you can apply with this, right? Autoimmune stuff.

Yeah. Living relationships, marriages, children, you know, it's not just to think the stuff that you would think would qualify as like traditional grief events, right? So anyway, thank you again for listening. Please like, subscribe, share, leave a review.

All these things help us get found. And again, we want to reach more people at this work. So have a great rest of your day. This is the Feel Free Again podcast and we will see you next time.

Thanks again, Kelly. Thank you.