Retirement as a Grief Event: How to Navigate One of Life’s Most Major Transitions

That's, I wish it was like that more. Yeah. And I'll just talk, I'll just tell the audience that you're, you're even more handsome face to face than you are on camera. So anyway, that said, oh, make me blush right now, Jim.

Anyway, you know, you, you, you, you talked to me, you know, back in 2000, before 2008, and even before 2009, if you had told me that I would be spending the next, you know, 15, 16 years, helping people navigate seasons of grief in their life and teaching them a method that would help them to get complete with relationships that were ended because of, you know, one thing or another, I would have just given you a blank stare and said, ride. And, and, you know, I had been in software development for a number of years, for about 18 years, mostly on the quality end of things. And I was, I was in the midst of starting a career transition to something just a little different from software development, but related to it. Not knowing that in the next two years, I would go from being software quality analyst to being going to school to be a marriage and family therapist.

So all this happened as the result of, in my response to the death of our daughter, Gail, on Valentine's Day, 2008, in a shooting that took place at Northern Illinois University, the campus here in Cal, Illinois. And she was 20 years old. She, she had just turned 20. She was, you know, sophomore, second year student there at N.I.U. and somebody broke into the class that she was in and started shooting.

And she was one of the five victims of that shooting. Just totally upended our lives. Prior to learning the tools of grief recovery, I was really bad with emotions. I really didn't understand emotions.

I didn't understand. And so I really didn't understand myself. And through the, and today, you know, I feel so much healthier and more at peace than I ever did before that. And I'm, I'm pretty confident from having talked to many people, more people than I can count over the last 16, 17 years, that that would not be the case if I hadn't taken the actions.

If I hadn't gone out and bought a copy of the grief recovery handbook. And with my wife started going through it together after our daughter died. And it just changed my life in so many ways. I have a better marriage and so many other things.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, as I'm sure you know, Joe, if we were in the same room, I would offer you a hug. And I just, I can't imagine what that loss was like for you and your wife.

And I wish I was in the room with you right now because I'd give you a hug. And I appreciate you sharing that with us. And forgive me if you said this. And if I was out of the moment, but the, the timeline when you, were you in tech still when you lost your daughter or were you already on your way to the, to marriage and family therapy?

I was still in tech at the time. Three weeks, three weeks to the day before the shooting took place. I had been laid off by my company. And so I was in the middle of a job search, but I was in the middle of a search for a tech job.

And, and, okay, okay. Yeah. And, yeah, go ahead. And, and so, and, and what?

Go ahead. Go ahead. No, I'm sorry. And if you're listening, we have a little bit of laps in, in the, in the connection.

So forgive us if we, if we stumble over each other a little bit, but please, the floor's yours, Joe. I was just going to say without, you know, taking a lot of time to describe it just that, you know, I started, you know, after Gale died about a month or two after that, discovered the grief recovery handbook and the grief recovery method went through that. And then it took me another year before I signed up and decided, this is what I want to do to help people. And so I went through the grief recovery certification training in, I think, was September of 2009.

And then I was certified then and I began working with griebers. And then I went back to school to following fall and completed my master's degree at N.I.U. in August of 2012. And so I began working in private practice after that as a therapist. Okay.

Okay. In terms of picking up the book, because a lot of people ask about this, I get this question a lot. When, when is it time to do grief recovery? You know, is it too soon or, you know, has a loss occurred too long ago?

Right? People are always kind of a little bit curious about when this work is to be done. It's a little unique, I would say, to find the book two months after the loss and have that courage to do that work right then. What, if you don't mind me asking you, when you found the book, what were your thoughts?

Were you ready to take the actions in the book? Were you, did you hesitate at all? Did you work through the book with a partner? If you can tell us a little bit about your experience with grief recovery, you know, when it happened after the loss, I think that's important for the audience because we, we do have so many questions on when to do this work.

And as you know, the answer that we give is it's really up to the individual. I have worked with people who have had very tragic losses like yours and worked very, very soon after the loss. I've had other people that came 20 years after the loss from a very tragic loss and we're, was, you know, ready to do the work then. So there is no one-size-fits-all, but if you can tell us a little bit about your experience navigating the book and the method, you know, following the loss, I think that would be helpful for our listeners, Joe.

Yeah. I found out about the book of maybe a month after the shooting from somebody attended our church. They had lost a son four years earlier. He had been murdered and they had gone through through a series of acquaintances and so on, found a grief recovery method, outreach program, and had gone through that and it had so changed their lives that Stan had gone and gotten certified to teach grief recovery.

And so he, oh wow, you know, he and his wife told us about their journey and how what an impact it had on them. And so I, to show how eager and desperate and lost I felt, I went out like the next day, went to Barnes & Noble, found a copy of the handbook, came back home and my wife and I, you know, I wasn't going to wait until there was going to be another program scheduled or anything. And honestly, I was skeptical. I was skeptical because, you know, the way that I thought back in those days is, well, here's a book that I don't see any Bible verses in this thing.

And I don't see, you know, this is not coming at it from a spiritual perspective here. And not like that, but I'm, this is a topic I don't know anything about. And so I just, you know, I just also, also being a very private person, you know, I was a little bit paranoid about just being open and vulnerable with people and everything. And so I felt more comfortable if we, my wife and me, we just go through this book together.

And so my wife was my partner. Yeah. And we went through it, took 12 weeks to go through it. And after we finished going through the program.

And yes, I was, you know, I, I read the thing thinking, you know, okay, I don't know if I agree with everything in here. I don't understand it all. But it would be unfair for me to criticize something without actually giving it a try. And so that, that was my approach.

That's how I, I approached and dealt with my own skepticism was see what these see what John and Russell have to say here, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to trust that this is okay. We went through it and boom. And then, and then a year, and so for those of you who are tempted, you know, maybe you're bereaved parents or, you know, whatever. And you feel like, oh, me and my wife can go through this.

And, you know, she could be my partner and so on. And so I go through this training a year, a year and a half later. And the trainer, you know, one of the first things that they say is you don't partner with a spouse or a close relative. And I said, that's exactly what we did.

And that's why I'm here. And so last day of the class, Steve, Steve says, you know, says that same sentence except for Joe, because he had come to see how effectively me and my wife had gone through it. My wife benefited as much as I did from it. And we just had the right relationship to be able to do that.

Not everybody he does. And so anyway, I just wanted to see that upfront there. No, I love that, Joe. And again, thank you for sharing this very powerful story.

And in the, you know, for people who do go through the certification training, you know, I do think we have some things that we would call best practices. And then, you know, but people come to us and they have found success doing it a different way. You know, I was, we had an interview a couple months back and the husband and wife who are working, who were working on their relationship, shared the grief recovery work to each other when we don't always really recommend that. And and again, you, you and your wife found a lot of comfort and help in the method and working together.

So again, there's the take away that we have had forever. And, and, you know, we have to be careful. We've been around for 50 years. So we think we know some stuff at this point.

But what I love is my dad always set the tone and and Russell did as well. Every relationship is unique. Therefore, every griever is unique. So there is a no one size fit.

All fits all. There's no cookie cutter thing. We have to honor the uniqueness of every individual, right? And so anyway, I am so glad you're here.

And I'm so glad that the work that you did with your wife around the book was helpful for you. And so helpful that, you know, you wanted to get trained and pay it forward other people. That's incredible. So if if you're okay with it, take us to okay, so you have this certification.

And I assume at this point, now you're in school to also become a marriage and family therapist. Is that the timeline or those things kind of happening at the same time? My my my my certification was in I think September, October of 2009. And at that point, I was still between jobs.

I still hadn't landed a position. I was still trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. And so I yeah, had a conversation with a counselor at Northern Illinois and told him that I was interested in pursuing a degree in counseling. This is something that I had thought about.

This wasn't something new to me. This was something that I had actually postponed about 12 years earlier. Because I was still raising my family and things were expensive. I couldn't afford to put myself to school and be a dad and husband and so on.

And so but I found out about this program at NIU and I enrolled. And the next cohort would be beginning in August of 2010. So I had to wait until 2010 to begin grad school. And then you know, two and a half years later, I got my degree and began to practice.

But all along the way, I kept on running into people who were grieving. And what was really alarming to me, even though grief was in the counseling room with nearly every client that I've you know, practiced with during my graduate program. And that my fellow students encountered my fellow students didn't see the grief. My teachers didn't see the significance of the grief.

And yeah, I did. And so I found myself taking several of my clients as a graduate student and beyond through the grief recovery method. And most of them came in and they the reason why they you know, they call it presented with grief. Most of them, that's that why they were there initially.

But the ones who you know, gave me the benefit of a doubt and started going through the grief recovery method with me. Many times the things that they had been coming, you know, diagnostically in went away after they had completed that first law. Yep. So that's where my that's where my education.

It's funny you mentioned this. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. It's funny. You mentioned this. I was just at a conference for first responders.

And I was there Monday and Tuesday. And it was a local event here in in Cordelaine. And just amazing people, probably you know, 300 people, firefighters, police officers, dispatchers, admin, support, you know, and all of that. And it was an amazing conference.

And I am so glad that all of these first responders are talking now about emotions. What what did not surprise me is the almost the total focus is on trauma. And you know, boy, there is trauma in that line of work. I have I have no arguments about that.

And a lot of the speakers and interventions were designed around trauma. But like you said, for and I don't know why this is. And I hope before I die, I'll, you know, I'll know the answer to this. And this is what gives me all the gray hairs is the amount of people that don't understand they are still carrying grief.

Right. And everybody in that room is carrying massive amounts of unfinished emotional trauma and emotional grief in their stories, right. And they would tell stories and they had the courage to tell these very powerful stories. And they would talk about the trauma.

And it, you know, it kind of broke my heart because they were missing all the key pieces of the others on grief in there as well. And again, luckily, Ed, our our vice president who has a law enforcement background, he did a really powerful talk around grief. And hopefully it opened some eyes there. But I find it, you know, I've been in this work now 15 years.

And, you know, before the term trauma, you know, we were talking about anxiety and stress and, you know, historically for whatever reason, different words are okay to talk about. But the big G word, as we call it, grief, is a place that's so off limits still, you know. And again, I figure out and, you know, please share with me, you know, if you have a way around this or to help people understand, hey, we have a lot of unresolved grief. There's nothing wrong with us.

But if we don't look at that, we're still carrying that stuff. You know, so anyway, do you have any thoughts on that? Our hesitancy to talk about grief and to identify things as grief. 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. I want to help people. I'm missing information, this missingly. I'm an advocate for the grieving process because I think 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 well, 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. The thing she was saying made me feel seen and normal and validated and not in scenes. 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. I'm able to help walk them through that and give them that same light bulb that came on in my head.

It was transformed. 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, is 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'd 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. Seeds are filling up. Sign up. You will not regret it.

I cannot wait to see you. Have a great day. I run into that all the time, you know, because you know, I'm always with you know, people. And I think relationship wise, I find myself being the person who, you know, I may meet somebody at a party or something like that.

And you know, after introductions and so on, they end up talking to me. And maybe I'll say a word here or there. But mostly I'll just be listening as they tell me their whole life story in 20 minutes. And then they realize, I'm sorry, I, you know, they get all apologetic and everything.

But along the way, I'm hearing about, you know, the highlights of much of what they share has to do with so and so. I lost this relationship. We ended in divorce. There was, you know, this happened, right?

Had a health crisis. And all these things that we know, we understand because of the definition we have of grief that all of these are grief situations. These are grief causes. Yes.

Yes. And so, you know, the, you know, yeah, you, you, you, yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. I was just going to say that you had a, you had a podcast where you were talking about men and grief and so on.

And as a therapist, I'd have men come to me, often sent to me by their wives saying, either you go and see somebody for anger or else, we might be done. And so these, these men would come to me and they'd sit down, yeah, my wife says, I'm, you know, angry and, you know, I, maybe I am, I don't know. Or some would say, yeah, she's got a point. And I'm, I'm really bothered by the way that I come across.

And I learned that one of the first things to ask was who died? Or, you know, what, what have you, what's been going on your life that makes you angry? And before that first session would be over, I'd be explaining what grief is. And the, the tie-in to, you know, the unresolved grief coming out in the form of anger.

And most of the time, they would say, well, that's not why I'm here. I'm here because of anger. But yeah, you, you, you seem to think that has some, and, you know, a couple months later, you know, they're telling me how their wife is really happy that they're not yelling. They're not blowing up anymore.

And they just feel so much more, first of all, aware of their emotions. And not afraid of them. Yeah. Or not trying to make them go away, but recognizing them is something really helpful for them to know that there's work that they need to do.

So yeah. Yeah. Now, thank you, Joe. That's very, very helpful, right?

Is when, when you get them in a safe place, and we're really good at setting up a non-comparative, non-judgmental environment for people to tell the truth about, you know, where they're at or how they're feeling, then it becomes easier to connect the dots and point out, hey, this may be unresolved grief, right? And again, we haven't, we just haven't found out how to do that from a marketing perspective yet. You know, until someone's in the chair, it's a little trickier to get people to think that it is about, you know, grief. And it really opened my eyes this two-day conference because, like I said, Ed did a very powerful talk and talked about, you know, his past and the losses that he's had.

And then throughout the rest of the next day and the end of that day, we had people coming up and, hey, and I had to man the booth. I had to like talk to people and hand out cards. And so, but Ed would quietly, one by one, take grieving people who felt safe enough now that we were talking about grief out to the lobby and, you know, and talk to them in some kind of safe place. And I look out the door and I'd see tears coming down and he'd just be doing grief or cover work.

So, you know, again, after the talk, it kind of made it safe to do that. But I can't tell you how many guys, you know, with tattoos and beards walked by our table as if we were, we had a communicable disease, you know, they did not want to look at grief or even, I don't know if they've been registered as grief, but we were not the most popular table, you know, in the in the in the conference. I'll say that. And, you know, I'm biased, but I thought we should have been, you know, and again, it's like it's one of those things where we call so many things depression, right?

But if you have a backpack full of unresolved grief from your past, it may be a bunch of unresolved grief, right? And if we, if we misdiagnosed stuff, we're going to mistreat stuff. And I think that we've seen that so, so much is like it's anything but grief. The stuff you're dealing with emotionally, it's trauma.

It's this and that, right? And it's like it could be grief. And from our perspective, a lot of the time it is grief. And the symptoms like you, like the reason I'm even going on in this direction is because of what you said a couple of minutes ago, when I help them with their grief, their symptoms went away, right?

And that's that's kind of the value of this work. If we can get more of the world to see that unresolved grief, it plays a huge factor in people's unhappiness and people's struggles, you know, with alcohol and drugs and anger and violence. So much of it is because of a backpack full of unresolved grief. And, and you know this, but I'm going to tell the audience yet again, right?

One of the reasons is is because society sets us up to believe at a young age that grief just takes time. So because, you know, Ed, Ed did by a show of hands, you know, how many people here are sad about something that happened a year ago? A bunch of hands went up. How many people were are sad about something that happened five years ago?

You know, a bunch of hands went up. How many people are sad about something that happened 10 years ago? No hands went up, right? And, and luckily I didn't, I didn't, you know, I didn't say anything at that point, but that's how everyone thinks, nope, 10 years passed, I'm good.

Time has healed that, right? And, and we know that's not that not the really the case. So anyway, I, part of your story, fine fascinating again that you're in tech and, and you know, one of my best friends here is in tech and very analytical, very intellectual, right, very kind of data driven. And then for you to make that pivot after the loss of your daughter and say, Hey, you know what?

I don't know about these, I don't, I'm not familiar with this whole emotional thing, but let me go in that direction. That, that is amazing that you made that pivot. And I'm so grateful that you found our work in conjunction with your other tools that you gathered from becoming a therapist. So if you're okay with it just because I can't believe time is flying, the thing that I kind of teased out in the beginning of the episode, which I don't think we've talked a lot about, but it's so important.

And I, and I found it in this first responder conference as well. How much they were talking about things fall off the tracks for a lot of firefighters and police guys when they retire, right? And you're, you're nearing retire, or you're in retirement now, but very early into retirement. Can you talk a little bit about how that has been the, the process of retirement?

What's on your mind? As somebody with the grief recovery method tools, you know, I'd love to explore that topic because I don't think we've given it a lot of airplay yet. Right. Retirement is, you know, I'll be, I'll be turning 70 in another couple months here.

And so as a therapist, I recognize that I have a responsibility in my clients. And I don't, you know, right now, as far as I know, I'm healthy, but I've also had situations in my life where, you know, I've been going about my day to day business and then, you know, spent the night in the hospital, not expecting that that was going to happen that day. And I didn't want to be in a position where I'm seeing 10, 15, 20 clients actively. And then one day, the office has to call all these people and say, Joe's not coming back.

You know, we're going to have to find somebody else for you to see because I know the, I know how traumatic that is. You know, a lot of people, you know, especially, you know, dealing with feelings of abandonment in childhood or other losses and things like that. How painful that is. And so I just decided about a year ago that I was going to just stop taking new clients and gradually, you know, go down to where I just had a couple two or three clients and then retire then and do it on my terms, not on, you know, something random happening.

And so that's that's how I approached it last year. But I'll all along the way, I recognize that I have given, you know, so many years of my life to this work. And I want to explore, you know, this transition on an emotional level and recognize that I'm going to be saying goodbye to not this one client, but to ever working with clients again. At the same time, you know, there was the sense, you know, people, people, you know, as you know, that, you know, people who go into this people work of counseling, it might be counseling, coaching, therapist, doc, whatever it is, you're the caring professions and a lot of people get their sense of worth from that.

And so I had to ask myself is this really something that you want to do. And the answer kept coming back to me. Yes, this is time. They're, I'm entering a new season in life.

I recognize the fragility of life, the fight, my own finiteness. And I recognize that there were some things that I put off doing a long time in my life and I want to do them. Never the lot. And so it's okay to give it up.

Yeah. And to be grateful for the work that I've been able to do, the people that, you know, God has put me with to help. And so let go of it. And so as a grief recovery method specialist, I decided to take the time and say goodbye and use the tools of grief recovery to get complete with my career.

And so I did that. I took those tools. I looked at the history of my, my career as a therapist and as a grief recovery method specialist and the key events along the way. And thinking of the people that I need to thank.

People that I need to forgive. People that I need to apologize to. And I did, you know, I did the timeline figured out what was incomplete for me in each of those relationships that were a big part of my career. Wrote out a letter and read that completion letter to my therapist.

And you know, you just, you just listened, you know, I explained, you know, just just to be a listener, not to, this is something for us to talk about or analyze or anything. Just the point here is for me to get, get these emotional laden communications out there. And after doing so back in, maybe September or August, September of last year, I felt even more at peace with being able to let go and move into this new season of my life, feeling good about it. And so I don't, I don't.

Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. Yeah, because of that, I don't have very many days where I'm like G I miss this or I miss that or I regret this. I just, I just, you know, I just don't.

Maybe other people might feel, you know, other people are going to feel differently because we're all unique and everything. But that's just been my experience with it. Yeah. Yeah.

I thank you, Joe. That I think that's so important. You know, a couple of takes away I got as you were talking is number one, how many people in society have the tools to identify, hey, number one, retirement is a grieving event, you know, and number two, there's some ways I can identify things that are unfinished in my career, that are incomplete in my career, and I can process those things so that I can be excited and clear. And in the moment for the next chapter of my life, the next season, like you touched on, right?

I think one of the things that people just don't naturally understand around the grief recovery method is that it can be a very good tool for retirement because society is going to pat you on the back. It's going to say, hey, isn't it cool? How much time you have now to fish or whatever or pursue those halbys that you've been pursuing? And that's all true, right?

And I'm excited when people are retired, I'm excited for them to do those things. But the problem is, is if that's the only thing we focus on, then they are isolated with, hey, you know, maybe you've had clients for years and years and years, I'm sure you really have learned to love your clients, right? And like you touched on too, this is kind of what my identity is about. And if we don't get complete and say goodbye to those things, those things are going to be inside of us churning and feeling incomplete, right?

Either on the surface or deep down. So I don't know what the statistics are, but again, at least around the first responders, but I think this is probably across the board, you know, the lifespan after retirement is, you know, not always, I think what it, what it could be if we could help people complete those emotions. I think a lot of the time, a lot of health issues, not again, not entirely caused by, but are definitely assisted by incomplete grief in the body. Right.

And so if we could help people do that, you know, the wouldn't it be great if people could live longer lives and enjoy retirement for longer without dealing with a bunch of stuff, emotions included, that's unfinished, that's helping with, you know, health problems move along and create a nice environment for health problems to thrive. You know, so I think that would be my goal is, is to have more people aware of that transitionary period is a grief event and we can work on that. So I love that, that you had that opportunity to do that. Yeah.

Yeah. Add that, you know, it was watching my dad go through his final months of life. As I was starting to read the grief recovery method, you know, the grief recovery handbook, and I saw my dad going through what he was going through and how people respond to him having, having had to give up all the things that he loved doing in his life because of his health and everything. And people would be all, you know, chat, you shouldn't be sad, you shouldn't, you should feel happy or whatever because you got to do, and I recognized that nobody was hearing him.

And it, I just realized that dad is grieving. And so I resolved as I was with my dad during those last couple months, that I would, I would be that person who would listen and say, yeah, dad, you have a right to feel that way. Yeah, I, I get it. Yeah.

It's very sad that you're no longer golfing, bowling, acting, whatever it was that you were doing, and you loved to do. So, and so I didn't want to be that way myself. And so, well, and that was another point I was going to bring up was if you have these tools, you may be able to retire a little earlier than if you didn't have these tools, you know, sometimes retirement is purely based on financial stuff. I get that, but a lot of the time people are not retired because they're just emotionally unfinished with a bunch of stuff.

They just don't know that's what's happening. And so they stay in a field of work for longer than they need to. And that's, and that can be a very frustrating thing to employers, to clients to, you know, again, a bunch of people because again, they, they frankly should be retiring, right? But because they're unfinished with that emotionally, they're writing it out too far.

You know, this isn't a left or right thing, but I wish a lot more politicians would understand this and retire much sooner because, you know, I don't think we need 80 to 90-year-old politicians in there. Now, they're probably sticking in there for different reasons, probably financial reasons. But, you know, again, with all jokes aside, I think a lot of people are not retired because they're emotionally unfinished. And if we can help them complete what is unfinished, then they're making decisions like you did based on, hey, I want to do this on my terms.

I don't want someone to have to pull me out of the position, you know, after a series of embarrassments or just, you know, stuff that that that isn't the way that I wanted it to be my choice on my terms. Like, I love that you had had that ability to do that. And I love that you kind of give credit to grief or cover tools as, as one of the reasons why, right? That's, it's so beautiful.

And, you know, so I love that we're talking about this topic. Have you, have you worked with clients on this before you got to retirement? Have you identified that for clients and help use these tools with other people around retirement before you, you applied these with your retirement? I had a number of opportunities to do so.

But these clients, they didn't quote, unquote, stick around, lying enough to really get into that exploration where we started that exploration. Okay, yeah, they were coming for different. Yeah. Yeah.

And so, yeah, they were coming in for other other reasons. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay.

And, and in terms of you touched on it, but, but I think for people that want a little bit more about the details, right? And that's one of the beauties of grief recovery is our work is not vague, right? It is linear and it is detail oriented, but in a way that honors the uniqueness of the work you need to do. In other words, we'll let you, you know, this, this method allows you to go to a million different emotions in places you feel unfinished, but it helps give you some structure in terms of how to put that to pen to paper and, you know, sort those feelings out and then again process them.

So, you know, you touched on some, some things that you were apologies for give significant emotional statements. We call those, you know, things in the, in the method recovery components. Could you give us a couple, if you're willing? Could you give us a couple specifics on, you know, things you needed to complete out of your career to give people ideas of, of, of maybe some ways that they could go around retirement, you know, feelings or processing feelings, you know, anything you can think of.

I have to take a moment to start to put you on the spot. Or you think? Because, you know, yeah, I've found this to be, well, like, like he mentioned, he mentioned, yeah. Just, it's, there's a phenomenon that, that I have seen, at least in my own life, is that once I have expressed that, that thought and, you know, processed that memory of some event or thing with someone through the method, it's like, I stopped thinking about it.

And so, I've learned, neurologically, that what we don't think about, yeah, we tend to forget. And so, when you say, can you think of some specific thing, Joe? It's like, and I want to be careful in saying that because we tell people, you're not going to forget people that you love. You're not going to, you're not going to forget these people.

And, and so, that's that what I'm saying. I remember, you know, things about my daughter to this day that, you know, I wouldn't remember about somebody else who was in my life during the same period because she's so significant. But, but the things that caused me pain at the time, they don't cause me pain in the same way anymore. And so, it's like, you know, if something isn't painful, you kind of ignore it.

That, that's why people die of lung cancer is because we don't discover we have lung cancer because we weren't having any symptoms. And so, the doctors don't discover it until they're finding something else or something's gotten really severe. And so, all that, yeah, that doesn't buy me any time to think about the answer to your question. But, no, no, no, this is great because what we're talking about, yeah, what we're talking about, Joe, right, you know this, but we're talking about incomplete feelings.

And that's a good indicator that you're incomplete with something. If you're thinking about it a lot, there, there is a high probability that you are incomplete with that thing. And the beauty of this method is we help you identify those things, put them to paper. And then we have ways that we really help people go identify the feelings around those thoughts and then process those things.

So, you know, again, not retirement, but when I moved, I was at Fox for seven years. I worked in a television and FX networks and like basic cable there. I was there for seven years. I had a lot of friends there.

My boss was a great mentor to me. I had highs and lows there, right? And let's just pretend that was end of my career and I was retiring, you know, and in reality, I was, I was moving on to agree for recovery. But, you know, that chapter, that seven years of my life, right?

How many different people did I want to say goodbye to? How many people did I want to thank my mentor that taught me about business and also taught me about being a husband and a father, all these conversations we had, you know, there's so much communication there that I never communicated to him because we're busy working, right? So, I needed to know what to do with that. I needed to know what to do with the feelings of, hey, for the last seven years, my identity was I was on my way up as a television producer.

That's what I wanted to do. And then life kind of took me in a different direction. I need to know how to say goodbye to all of those feelings around that, right? So, you know, there's tons of examples if we do what you did, which is graph our career.

And what essentially in the book, there's a thing called a relationship graph. And usually we do that around on people. So, I'm going to graph my father or I'm going to graph my sister. I'm going to graph my wife.

But what we're saying is you can also graph your career, you know, Joe can graph his career as a marriage and family therapist. And it's like, we're going to start at when we have the idea to do that. Then we're going to go through school all the way to present day. We're going to chart all the really fun, exciting things about the career.

We're going to chart all the sad and painful memories around the career. And then we're going to work on getting complete with that. So, you know, that's what Joe did on getting complete with that career. And that's what I did with getting complete with this whole other career field once I moved.

And again, if you don't do that, that sits in you. Right. And then robs you of different choices in your new career. It robs you, you know, I'm sorry, I keep going back to first responders, but they're, they're on my mind right now.

I have a buddy and we coach travel ball together. He's a great guy, you know, and he's been street cop for a long time. He was in the streets, right. And I've heard, you know, wild stories about him, you know, fighting crime in his town and all that.

And then he gets promoted to detective. So now he's behind a desk, right. Well, what do I know that maybe no one's talking to him about? This is a grief event for my friend.

Now, he may say, hey, I'm getting old. I want to, I need to get behind a desk. Maybe his wife was saying, Hey, I can't keep hearing about these dangerous stories. You know, you the pays better.

So we're going to foot as a society and friends of his. We're all going to focus on the positives of him being a detective. But I know that this is a grief event for him because, you know, he may never be on the street again or me, you know, there were things that were his identity. There were things he liked about that.

And now it's different, right. And it's like, if, if we don't know how to process that, it can be tricky navigating this, this transition, right. So, you know, again, right, that the, I think you're in my passion is educating the world around grief and what is grief. And there is so much more grief in the world than people give it credit for, right?

It's like, I can't tell you how many times I have talked to someone said, Oh, I have people grief and loss. And it's like, Oh, that's really cool that you do that work. But if we sat there and did a loss history graph, we would find a bunch of stuff we could work together on right now. So again, it's just educating people and things they don't know about yet, you know, that.

But we're going to call it a bunch of different stuff. And so, you know, anyway, yeah, as my thoughts, but, but yeah, but yeah, as a therapist, I mean, you know, things that, you know, were part of that process of incomplete relationships and everything. There were people that I had looked forward to working with in the office. I had started working with a new practice with the, you know, specific desire to be working with colleagues to have people to, you know, rub elbows within the office to see between clients, bounce cases off of, and that's something that I was missing having my own independent practice.

And so I go to work with these people. And I'm just getting to know them a little bit on a first name basis and COVID hits. There are people that I never saw again. And I worked in this office for a couple of years and during which time I could go a month or two without seeing another human being in the office other than my clients.

And so there was, there was a lot of pain. Yeah, there you go. A lot of pain around that. And so there was anger, you know, towards government officials, there was anger towards, you know, all the people who, you know, took the ultimate, you know, you know, remedy for COVID is you just don't see anybody.

And then there were the people who did start coming in and seeing me in person even when other therapists weren't seeing people in person. I was taking people in and seeing. And just how grateful I was to these people for taking the risk and coming in and, you know, getting the extra benefit of face to face time with another human being as well as appreciation for how hard they worked to change and to grow. And so these are some of the things and, you know, there were specific people that I had in mind that you know, were attached to these, these feelings and these undelivered communications that I had to make.

So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Those are, yeah, great examples, great examples of what we're talking about.

And I remember that too, right? We, and I'm grieving this and I haven't processed this to be honest with you. But same thing. And before COVID, we had an office, we had several employees in the office.

We all worked together. We brought our dogs there. And obviously it was a, it was a nice community. And then COVID hit and then I moved Idaho and now I work in this kind of rental space with no other employees in person.

And, you know, and at times, right? And it's conflicting feelings. At times, I love that I can work from home and I don't have to come in the office and blah, blah, blah. And that's all great.

That's the above the line positive stuff. That's not stuff I'm unfinished with. But I'm unfinished with seeing a bunch of people, including my mother-in-law, who's amazing and, and Ed and, you know, and, and, and all these people that have, you know, been in the office. And I think a lot of us are grieving that change, right?

Yeah. In terms of being remote workers now. It's a huge thing. No one's talking about it.

We just talk about the, the perks and the benefits of it. But we don't talk about the sad parts of it, right? Which is more human, human contact, right? So anyway, I love that example, Joe.

Very, very powerful. If you would, I can't believe it. We're run out of time, though. I would you talk about the book that you wrote, Joe, with us?

Yeah, I just, after, after Gail died, you know, all these memories of my relationship with her as a father, you know, were, were fresh in my mind and everything. And I started writing down anecdotes and other things. And so, you know, I wrote this book called it Cartwheels in the Rain, Finding Faith in the Wake of the Unthinkable. And it was based on one of the anecdotes, actually, is a pretty frequent anecdote from people of our daughter going out in thunderstorms.

She would go out. It could be pouring rain and she'd go out and start turning cartwheels and catching raindrops on her tongue. And she just loved being out in the storm and everything. And so I started, you know, capturing these because I wanted the world to, you know, know our daughter.

And I also, in the, the other goal of the book was just to share my heart as a, in my journey, as a bereaved dad. And what that first year was like, this, you know, having, losing a child in a school shooting is not something that happens every day. I know people tell me, oh, it's happening. It doesn't happen every day.

And, you know, by and large, right? There were tens of thousands of people, parents of people who went to that school who have no idea what we went through. And so I also got to share about the grief recovery and the, the journey that we had with that and the difference that it made in our lives, including in, and helping us in our, in our faith, faith journey. You know, the grief recovery program is, is not a, if people will call it that a faith-based program, but it also doesn't deny one's faith.

It simply takes the, the religious piece of, and some of the judgment and intellectualization that goes on in, for many grieving people and the relationships that are in and says, you know, no, we're not, we're not doing that. You, you are entitled to what you're feeling is you're, you're not wrong, there's no wrong or right feeling here. And we're going to honor that. And I found, as, as I work with people of, of faith over the, over the course of, you know, the last 16 years or whatever, that many people just regain their faith or their faith is strengthened after going through the program.

And so the book, you know, I don't preach anything in, in this book, I simply share the reflections of my faith journey as well as the impact of grief recovery. And I tell in the end of the book, hey, I'm going to go back to school to become a therapist. So I mean, this book predates that journey. And so on.

So it's kind of fun to look back at it and see, wow, I did that, you know. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll make sure, we'll make sure to link to it, Joe, and, and make sure people can, you know, we'll get a link for you on where people can find it and make sure in the show notes, wherever you're watching this or listening to this, that you can check that book out. Joe, you know, again, on, on behalf of my father and Russell and all the people that have come before me, thank you for all the work you've done with this method to help people.

I am so, so grateful that was helpful for you and your wife. Again, I'm giving you a big hug. I look forward to the next time I get to see you in person because it's way cooler than online. And you're just, you're an inspiration to me and a bunch of people at our team.

You're very loved at, you know, at the Grief Recovery Institute. Thank you. And for all of you listening, yeah, absolutely. I want to thank everyone for listening.

If you're interested in this work, again, a great place to start, like Joe touched on, is the Grief Recovery Handbook, you know, in the Goodie bag at this conference I was just at, we put a book in every single person's Goodie bag there, right? We didn't just put like a card. We put a book because, you know, you can work right out of the book. Now, the best case scenario, in my opinion, is that you are working with a Grief Recovery therapist.

Sorry, a Grief Recovery specialist could be a therapist, could be, you know, someone trained in mental health or just someone in the local community that just does Grief Recovery working alongside the book, helping people go deeper. But again, a great place to start as a book, another place to start is finding a specialist in your area. You can also call the office and we'll help you, you know, talk about the different options you have. But again, if you're listening to this, there's a reason.

And please share this with other people. Grief, unresolved grief, I would say, is an epidemic in our country. It goes unnoticed. It goes undiagnosed as unresolved grief.

That's a passion for us to talk about it. And if we don't know what we're dealing with, then we're going to, you know, use other tools that may not be as helpful as a tool designed to directly help you complete what is unfinished with you, with Grief. So anyway, Joe, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for your time. Thanks. Cool. Any kind of last things that you want to leave with the listeners?

Yeah. Just know that what you're feeling is what you're feeling. Don't judge yourself for feeling what you're feeling. There are no right or wrong feelings.

And if, you know, I don't want, you know, the fewer people that were like me before 2008 in the world, the better, the fewer people who are suppressing and distracting themselves from feeling what they're feeling, the better, I think. So yeah, yeah, I love that very, very wise. And including me too, I hope there's less people than when I did this work, you know, so anyway, Joe, thank you. Thank you for listening.

You guys have a great rest of your day or evening. And we will see you next time. This is the Feel Free Again podcast.