The Truth About Grief, Healing, and Who You Become After Loss with Rachel Tenpenny McGonigle

You're listening to the Peachy Profit podcast, episode number 407. Today I'm sitting down with the grief gal coach, Rachel and discussing the truth about grief healing and who you become after loss. Are you ready? Let's get started. Hi, I'm Beverly Simpson, former fitness manager turned online personal training business owner. And this podcast is where smart fitness professionals, including trainers and clinicians, discover how to increase client performance in movement, package and position their products and services and get out of their own way so that they can increase their revenue to live a life that they love without sleazy sales. Welcome to the PT Profit Podcast. What's up, coach? Thank you so much for pushing clay on another episode of the PT Profit Podcast. I'm your host, Beverly Simpson, and if this is the first time you're hanging out with me today, welcome. I'm super pumped that you're here. I have a very special extraordinary guest on the show today. She is a client of the accelerator program and she has recently written an incredible book called the Truth about Healing after Loss. You can find it on Amazon. And today a we are discussing Rachel's groundbreaking work on the truth on loss, grief healing, how to show up for others who are grieving and uncovering a five step process to remembering who you are and accessing healing and joy on the other side of loss and honestly, the truth about what loss actually looks like. So without further ado, let's go ahead and roll that interview. What's up, Rachel? Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. Honestly, it is a pleasure and privilege to be here with you. Your work has impacted me profoundly, not only for me, but also for people that I have worked closely with. So, honestly, I am really excited to dive into your work today. How are you?

I'm doing really, really wonderful and I'm really excited to be here. So thank you.

Okay, so for those of you who are not familiar with Rachel's incredible work, can you please share with us a little bit about who you are, who you serve and how you got there.

So I'm a grief coach, so I specialize in helping people navigate life's most difficult experiences. So unexpected transitions, losses, and anything from traditional loss, like the loss of a loved one, but also the loss of health, the loss of finances, the loss of a business. I've even recently moved into the space of helping highly successful entrepreneurs navigate the sale of their company. The emotional side of it, not the strategic side of it, because it's turning out that even meeting a huge life goal can come with a ton of unexpected loss. And if you don't have loss processing skills, it can be incredibly difficult to, to transition into a life with meaning and purpose. And so that's ultimately what I promise all of my clients, that you can live a life that is meaningful and purposeful again, even after loss. Because it's hard because I know, because both of my baby daughters died 17 years ago. They died six days apart from each other. They got very sick and it was just a horrible, horrible experience. And everybody told me that a mom who loses a child will never be okay. And they told me that once a griever, always a griever. And I just, I don't know how I knew, because I can't say it was a cognitive knowing, but it was like this little knower inside me, like this knower in my spirit that said there's no way that is the only option for me moving forward. I had a two and a half year old son at the time as well, and he needed a life and a mom. And I just said, like, I'm gonna have to figure this out. And when I do, I will tell everybody who wants to know. And that's why I went into coaching, because I eventually did figure it out. So I started teaching other people how to figure it out. And now that's why I wrote my book, so that people can access what I've learned over the last 17 years. That has also helped me and thousands and thousands of my clients. So I love it.

Okay, so what's the name of the book?

It's called the Truth about Healing After Loss.

Okay, I love it. So you, what I love about your approach is that it is unlike anything else out there that we, that we often hear about when we're taught, when we're talking about grief, just from the lens of, of, of just exactly what you were saying. People are told you're never going to be the same, and it almost feels. So then in addition to feeling like I'm going to be sad forever, I'm. I am assuming that there must also be this sense of guilt if and when people start feeling better. So I'm curious if you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit more about your process in terms of taking someone who's grieving position of healing.

So first of all, you're exactly right. When you become a griever, you find yourself in this alternate reality, this sort of like third dimension that you're, you never realize you'd be in because you, you're either sort of, I don't know what grief is like. I've never had a loss. Or you become a griever. And then some grievers decide that they want healing after their loss, that they don't want to be sad forever, and they don't want their loss to define them. And so they start to step out into this idea of, well, what does healing look like? And the grief community can be very upset by that. It can feel like you've become a traitor, like, first you found your people. We're all grievers. We're all hurting together. We're the only people who understand each other. And then you decide to take a risk or go rogue and say, well, maybe I want healing in my life. I don't want to hurt forever. And then you're once again rejected, right? You're once again the outsider. And so it can be a very lonely process to decide to heal for two reasons. One, the fear of losing that belonging. Right? Where do I go now? I don't want to do this alone. And then two, the guilt and the regret and the confusion around. If my love isn't connected to my pain, how will people know how much I cared about what I lost? Right? So our. Our love and our pain start to become directly connected. And the. If we're in less pain, we get accused of loving less. And we don't want. I think we're loving less because that feels like betrayal to our loved one that we lost. And so it can be a very tricky place to be. And unless someone kind of comes in to help guide you and speak into those confusing places, it can be hard to navigate by yourself. It's totally possible. Like, I got through it largely on my own, but the learning curve and the trial and error and the amount of time that it took, there's no reason why, you know, I'm not the first person to grieve. I wasn't then. I'm not now. I will not be the last person to grieve. Yet for some reason, in our culture, we treat every griever like they're the first one, right? We all grieve our own way. Every grief journey, it's unique, which is really code for figure it out yourself and don't bother me with it. Anyone who's gone before us, who's grieved and healed should be guiding. They should be leading the way. We should be able to connect ourselves with them, right? Walk with them, and they'll show us the path. And so in a world where, you know, grief is not an if, it's a when all of us will experience significant losses, many more than one time. And so we need to start treating it like it's real, not like it only happens to other people. And use that wisdom to guide and talk about these tricky things like the pressure to not heal because healing is betrayal. The pressure to not seek meaning and purpose because you have to leave your people behind in order to do it. The pressure to find closure instead of completion, which I talk about in my book. There's no such thing as closure. We have to start expending. Expound. What is it called when you reveal some of these myths and misunderstandings that people believe are true about grief? And my book is just full of me saying that's not true. There's a different way to see it, right? Here's why people say that, but also why it's not valid. And then I offer a five step process, a real tangible process based in holistic methods. Nutrition, self care, relationship improvement, different perspective. Like you can touch and see and feel these things. They're not ethereal. You don't just have to wait for time to magically heal you. If you're lucky, you don't have to give your power away to, you know, because everything happens for a reason. I hate that phrase. Everything doesn't happen for a reason. And if, if it does, what kind of a reason? A good reason or a bad reason? I, you know, like in the weeds with some of this stuff and I take people out of that and say we don't have to answer all of life's most philosophical questions in order to start taking really good care of our bodies, stewarding our hearts and leading ourselves towards more relief and more joy and less pain and less overwhelm.

Okay, I love that. So I'm, I'm curious. Can you walk us through one of the biggest misconceptions that typically people believe to be true when it comes to grieving? And then what would be, you know, what would be that five step process to help them move through it?

Oh my gosh. There's so, there's so many grief myths. So many. Like our culture is just riddled with them. All you have to do is go to any Instagram page where it's, it's a griever and you'll at least see like four or five of them. I, I think the biggest one that is holding people back is this belief that we grieve because we love, right? That you see it all the time. Like we grieve in proportion to our love and the More we love, the more we're going to hurt. And I actually disagree with that. That has not been my observation in 17 years. We grieve largely in proportion to our identity. The more clear we are on who we are, the more capable we feel to heal and move through loss. When our identity is directly correlated to who or what we lost, we don't go through a love crisis. Right? We lost who we love, we go through an identity crisis. We don't know who we are without this person or this thing. And so the path to healing is not addressing the pain associated with the loss. It's addressing an identity crisis that needs to be solved. We have to come out on the other end more self aware than we've ever been. When we know who we are, we heal from identity. We don't heal for identity. Like healing doesn't give us identity. We get identity and then we heal from our identity.

Oh my gosh. Okay, so that's so. So the first step then is uncovering, you know, getting closer to yourself. Essentially.

Yes. You get to need to get to know yourself in a way you never ever have your self awareness. Like one of the things I put my clients through always is we start out with personality profile tests, like all kinds of measurements. We really like how are you woven together? Are you an introvert? Are you an extrovert? What that even really means? Because again, we're totally taught it's incorrect. What we're talking about introversion and extroversion, right? We have to really understand what that means. And then we look at our personality, then we do a whole value system analysis. What do we really care about? What really matters? Then we look, I do something called a loss history assessment, which we actually look at other areas of loss in your life that might have created filters and a belief system, most often false belief systems around what loss means and how to cope with it. And we rearrange that and we replace those few filters with clear filters and we add skills. So much of healing after loss is about adopting skill sets. Like it really is a skills based process. It's not about willpower, it's not about perspective. It's about getting to know yourself well enough to see where you're missing skill sets and then equipping yourself. Like the goal is that you have a toolbox that's full. You open that toolbox, you have all the tools you need. When we open it and we realize tools are missing, well then our first step is how do we get that tool in the toolbox?

Okay, so you Know, I'm, I'm curious also in terms of one of the things that you said is that you also help high achieving entrepreneurs, you know, you know, move through their loss of, of their companies, right? So with that, and I'm sure it's true in other types of losses, but this is through the lens of what I'm thinking about when I ask you this question is with that there, there is a sense of high achievement. So when I think of high achievers, it's like if X. And one of the things that I know you talk about is, is, you know, experiencing, experiencing grief even after you, or experiencing an emotional, you know, pain even though you've healed. So I'm curious how you navigate and how you help someone when they feel like, oh my gosh, I thought, I've already gone through this, why am I feeling sad? Like, what is the evolution of healing?

So first of all, we're fooling ourselves if we believe that with, when we acquire or achieve, when we hit goals, when we reach mile markers, that with gains only come gains and there's never losses involved with our gains. Like we. One of my pet peeves is when people try to oversimplify really complicated things, right? Sometimes we just have to admit, like, okay, this is complicated. It doesn't mean it's not understandable and it's not, doesn't mean we can't tackle it, but it is complicated. And when we try to just put everything in something, a format that's just too oversimplified, right? Too easy, we miss some of these really important dualities and dichotomies that live in our lives. Like two opposing things can share the same space. So we can, for example, sell our business that we've been building for 20 years for many, many millions of dollars and get our goal, gain tons of money, gain freedom, gain achievement and recognition, and also still lose our structure, lose a sense of identity, lose the people that we built that company with for 20 years because now they're working for the new CEO or the new owner, right? Lose all of the other things that come alongside great gains and great achievements. And if we look at any other part of our life, we see that all the time, right? We have a baby, wonderful gain addition, right? And wonderful thing that we wanted to have in our lives. We chose it. It's important to us. And then we also look around and go, oh my gosh, but there's so many other things that had to leave or go in order to make room for that thing in our life. Marriage, finances, relationships, you know, health and wellness, anything you look at anything. And what happened is our society is so focused on achieving and we are taught how to acquire things so well that the other part of it, of being taught how to lose things got left behind. I come along and teach people how to process losses because losses are not necessarily anyone's fault or because anybody did anything wrong. Many of them are just part of life. Some of them are simply tragedies, right? And so we have to be careful what kind of ownership we're taking on, right? How we're allowing those things to label us and tell us about ourselves. But most importantly, especially when it comes to high achievers who have this great achievement that comes with all these losses, they feel terrible about that. It feels like some kind of weakness to them. So they will keep it a secret. They won't tell people how depressed they are, how lost they feel, how aimless, how this didn't magically solve all their problems and give them the most deepest fulfillment they ever imagined. Or they might get brave enough to finally tell somebody how they're feeling and their response is, oh, wow, I feel so bad for you. You and your hundred million dollars. Wow, okay, it must be so hard to be you, right? And so they, it's not funny, but it's so true.

It's true.

They don't get any compassion, they don't get any support. They get, well, just take your money and figure it out. And so I offer another alternative, a whole different path that says, yeah, even with great accomplishment comes loss. And those losses deserve to be addressed and processed. And you deserve the same level of skills to process loss. I call it loss mastery, right? We have to master it. And we apply those to whether we apply it to our work. We apply it when our children leave for college. We apply it to when we decide to leave one business and start another. We apply it to the billions and billions of things in our life. So again, it's just an extra skill set. And I believe that in the professional entrepreneurial world that the missing skill set that is holding people back from absolutely killing it is loss processing skills.

Curious, in your opinion, okay, you, you talk about loss processing skills. Is there a correlation and do you address it then to, you know, fear? Because we hear a lot of things about people being like, move through fear. We need to be fearless. In your opinion, do you think that, that that would be easier with law, or that maybe it's not even about fear, that if you addressed the loss or the risk of loss that you would be able to incorporate fear better, integrate fear better, and then absolutely crush it. I'm curious your take on that.

Yes. Well, when we feel more capable to handle loss in our life, then we're more likely to risk anything that might have a loss. And we can make a more informed decision as well. Because when we look around and go, I don't know how to deal with loss, then any situation that might have loss attached to it, we're going to, we're not going to like it. And we're also probably going to strategize how to stay as far away from the chance of loss as possible, which sometimes means we're functioning below our potential. Right. And I'm not against risk management at all. I do think there's something very wise about assessing levels of risk. I don't think we should be reckless. I am not that type of person. I'm not a reckless person. But I think bravery and recklessness are two very different things. And when we feel more skilled at being able to cope and recover and walk ourselves through very painful, difficult experiences, we're more likely to push ourselves a little further than we would go, Try a little bit harder, you know, and you hear it all the time. Like, I was a personal trainer many, many years ago before, which was a huge part of what influenced my holistic model. But when I was personal training, I was NASM certified back in like the early 2000s, and I loved, loved it. But when I was working with my clients, the thing I realized right away is they were looking for way more emotional support than they ever were. Like workout skills. Like the, the workout skills was secondary.

Yes.

Form and procedure. And they didn't, you know, they weren't very comfortable in the gym. But once that was, I could solve that in like a session. Right. What they really needed was help believing in themselves, redefining their values, helping them walk through these false beliefs that all of their problems would go away if they just lost £15. Right. Like all of those limiting beliefs that they come in the box of fitness, but really their deeper identity issues and fitness is just a wonderful door to helping them understand themselves, test themselves, get to know themselves in a new way. But when you spend a little bit of time pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and then realizing one, you either can do it or like, oh, I can make it, I. I have what it takes, or you fail, but you can recover. So like recovery skills, repair skills are huge, then loss doesn't feel so crippling. And those repair and recovery skills are part of lost processing Skills. And if all we've been trained is how do you acquire. And when you go into the high achieving entrepreneurial world, very few people have failed a lot. They failed some, but they've won big, right? They've achieved big. And so losses are something that they, they don't. They're like an enemy, something they have to beat, something they have to win, not something that they have to live alongside of and actually learn how to integrate. Right. Like grief. Not a problem to be solved. It's an experience to understand. And high achieving entrepreneurs are just always problem solvers. So everything's a problem that they have to solve. Right. If you're a hammer, everything's a meal. Yes.

Like, I know, I'm like, yes, that's exactly what I talk about. What's the.

Right. And sometimes what we need to really understand is the problem isn't what I think the problem is. Yeah, right, okay. And if the problem is something else, and this is way outside your wheelhouse, and maybe the problem is I don't have any lost processing skills. Well, now we have a bigger problem because people are, what the heck are those? And where do I go get those?

And this is what, your book? Yes, this is. And these are in your book. Right. Oh, what I, what I'm curious too. Right. Is someone who has maybe not experienced loss or maybe they haven't experienced loss to the, to the degree of someone that they know and love, would this book potentially also assist in helping, you know, being a supportive partner or supportive present someone else's grieving process?

Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's basically a manual for how to understand and support grief better. Whether you're the griever or you love the griever, it will give you all kinds of insight and awareness into what it really means to walk beside a griever.

So, you know, you said, you know, these are some of the worst statements that you can say as a grief supporter who's walking by guy like, oh, everything happens for a reason. What are some of the recommendations that you would tell someone who is supporting a griever? What should we say? How should we show up for someone who's in pain?

The less you say the better. More words are usually bad. Just because we just end up putting our foot in our mouth, we don't mean to. And people talk a lot about, you know, well, but their intention is right, you know, their heart is in the right place. And I understand that. But also, you can still hurt somebody, even with good intentions. And part of what's Missing in grief culture is we really need to be more intentional instead of using, well, you know, I. I didn't intend to hurt their feelings. I know, but you also didn't intend not to. Like, we need to be intentional about how we show up. And it's just to be clear, I am not saying that it's other people's job or our culture's job to make grieving easier for grievers. Okay? That is 100% our responsibility as grievers. Healing is an inside job, and we have to take full ownership of our own hearts. But support does matter, and I teach all of my clients how to ask for that support specifically. But if you love a griever and you want to show up, well, for them, say as little as possible. One of the things that is often said is, if you need me, I'm here. Call me. Well, grievers don't know what they need. And by the time they figure out what they need, they feel bad asking because how long are you supposed to grieve? And how they feel needy and they don't want to overwhelm. And everyone's sort of moved on with their life. And so instead of, if you need me, I'm here, call me. Just keep checking in. Send that text message. Can I order anything off Amazon for you? Can I deliver groceries for you? How are you getting enough sleep? Can I come over for a cup of tea? Would you like to go for a walk? You know, and you just. And everyone's different, so they're going to need different things, but you just keep checking in. And you don't just check in for six weeks. You check in for two years. Right? Just, hey, how can I help it? You don't have to bombard, and you don't have to meddle and overwhelm. And if they keep pushing you off, that's fine. Just respect their boundaries. But if you're waiting for them to take the initiative or to reach out to you, they won't, because it's. It's too complicated. And then you'll think, oh, they must be okay. And no one's okay. Everyone's just confused and doesn't know what to do. You know, any statements around. You know, one of the things people told me a lot was, you know, trust God's will. Everything happens for a reason. You wouldn't be who you are today if this didn't happen to you. You know, like, I had another child after my girls died. And they'd say, well, if you, you know, if Aubrey, Nelly, didn't die, you wouldn't have Colton and stuff. So not helpful, right? Oh, look at this business you've built. It's helped so many. I would trade it all in a nanosecond if I got my girls back. Right. There's no amount of good that has come out of this. Even though I'm very proud of the business I have built, it's very meaningful to me. But if, you know, God himself came down and said, I'll give you your girls back, but you have to trade it, I wouldn't have to think about it like, yes, we'll do it. Right. Because they were so much more valuable, so much more important. And so trying to convince people to change their perspective or see it in a different way is zero helpful. And you need to be careful because if you get a really feisty one, you know, they'll yell at you or punch you in the throat or something. So you gotta be really careful what you say to hurting people because grief takes you to a whole new level. I never felt pain like that in my whole entire life. Right. I realized why people do really extreme things to get out of their pain. Things like self medicating. And I never chose those things. But I understood why people would do that because the pain is just unfathomable. And if we don't have tangible skill sets that help people be able to take their power back and manage their pain and their overwhelm, they will go into coping behaviors instead of healing behaviors. And if as a society, we're only making it even more difficult saying difficult things to them, we're not part of that healing, we're just part of that coping. You know, if your friends have to get away from you in order to feel their own feelings, you know, you. You're not being a good friend, right. You want it to be somebody they want around and most likely they want because you're just quiet and helpful and supportive.

Yeah. That's good. That's incredible insight. So a couple of things that I.

Want to ask you.

One is what does healing look like once you are through, you know, the process or you know, once you're. And I'm assuming, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming that healing looks different for each person. So what does ha. You know, as a coach and as a professional and as someone going through the experience, what would you say typical signs of healing actually look like?

Like. Yeah. So actually healing looks the same for everyone. Okay, great. How now how it is applied and the results might Be different, right? But, like, it's very. It's very much like your program. Like, there's a method to the madness, right? There's a. A strategy. And what it look, what healing looks like is feeling more powerful than your pain, right? Your pain isn't in charge. You are in charge. And so when you feel empowered to have more joy in your life than hurt, right? More peace in your life than fear, basically, the ratios change. And it's not what it looks like on the outside. Like, oh, I had nine good days in a row, or I laughed today, right? Those are. That's the proof that healing is happening. But that's not what healing looks like. Because what's really happening is we start waking up every morning feeling like we are back in charge of our inner world. And when we feel that we have power again over our inner world and our grief is not the most powerful thing in our life, that's what healing looks like. And so for different people, what being in charge of their inner world and having more power over their pain looks like will be. I went on a mountain bike ride, I ate some healthy food, I spent time with my kids. And other people are like, I started a business, I planted a flower, I hung out with my mom, right? So it has different results, but it's all from the same place. And it's from that sense of empowerment that my pain no longer controls me. Because that's what's scary about grief, that early grief phase. Like, we are at the mercy of our pain and getting a sense of power by a sense of. I don't like that word control, but I call it like, in charge. Being able to be in charge of our inner world again, so that we're just not at the mercy of all of those big, difficult, overwhelming emotions is priority one. Because that's what's so scary about grief. It's like, am I ever going to be able to function? Will I always feel like this? Do I have any say in my life again at all? Because loss makes us realize that we're not in control of as much as we thought we were. And now we have a crisis of belief and we have to, you know. But instead, a lot of people will try to get control in their external world, when in reality, the first thing we need to get is back in control of our internal world.

So for your clients and the people that you work with, especially your high achievers, like, you know, for me, I can even sense that, felt that. That I can see myself going through that, achieving, you know, checklist of like, okay, so I need to do this and then I'll do this and then I'll need to move through this. Right, so how do you coach your, your people who you know through those feelings of like, I feel like this is a setback. Like, you know, how do you help them see some of their blind spots and, and when would do you recommend for people to get support professionally?

So I walk them through a program just like you, that has Every. It's a 12 session program, and each session has a specific goal to teach a certain skill. And that's based on the assessment I take at the beginning because I, I'm able to assess what skills are most important to teach. I don't, you know, if people already have a skill set, I'm not going to waste their time teaching them something they already know. And what's so interesting is, you know, it's amazing how you can teach emotional content, like concepts with strategy. Like, you can give people tangible anchors. So I don't just teach concepts. I help them understand that concept and then apply it to their life. Because when they get a return on their investment, when they get fruit from that, they go, oh, right, I see, I see the value. So I do help them connect those dots and, you know, a lot of them are helping them understand what their feelings really are for, like, the difference between feelings and emotions, how to use them filters in their life that sort of set up their resistance to that, how to lean into certain things, also how to maintain those boundaries. Like, the goal is not. You know, I had, I have one client who said flat out to me, he said, I'm not interested in just sitting here and talking about my feelings. And I said, good, because that's not what we do here. We don't just sit and talk about our feelings. We talk about where we're stuck, what's holding us back. Are we aligned to our value systems? Are we achieving those values? Right? And because that's ultimately what healing work is after loss is, it's recalibrating ourselves back into the valuable and meaningful life we want to live when we've taken the biggest hit we've ever taken, right? It's really like, I don't know if you watch UFC or like mixed martial.

Arts like I am, but I'm familiar.

I'm familiar. Yes. Huge fan. And you know, sometimes, you know, the knockout will be so brutal, like they don't even know where they are when they wake up, right? Like they, or they'll get, you know, into a chokehold. That they have to bring out the smelling salts to get them, you know, to come back out. Like they just, just take a hit. And these guys are tough. Like, this is all they do is train to like take hits. So when something takes them out, it's big. And grief is like that. You know, we trained our whole lives to achieve here, accomplish here, or be proficient here, or get over this, or, you know, handle this. And then something bigger than we ever imagined comes along and pulls the rug out from under us. And so it's like, how do we get back up when we're seeing stars and we don't even know where we are? Well, we do it the same way as UFC fighter. We go back to the basics. We heal, we recover, we give ourselves some rest. We recover, we understand what self care really looks like and what it really is. It's not going to the day spa and taking a million vacations. We understand how to feed ourselves, rest ourselves, communicate. My one of my biggest programs that my clients love is I teach them to actually understand how their feelings are connected to their unmet needs. And when we can identify our unmet need, we can create an action step and then we have a specific ask. Whether that ask is of ourselves, of someone else. So now we're making measurable steps forward because just telling people how we feel gets us nowhere. Unless we know what we need from that feeling, we can't move. All high achieving entrepreneurs love the idea of getting very specific, action step oriented. I just teach them how to understand that from how they're feeling instead of reading spreadsheets and data and board meetings. Right?

So true, so true and so good. One of the things you said too was giving people pain. Tools for pain management. What are some of your favorite tools?

Tea. Drink your tea every day. Fine. So I, I advise all of my clients to let go of their coffee. Coffee is hard on the system, increases anxiety and dehydration. It depletes you of minerals, which are all the things you need in order to cope and heal through loss. So replace that with tea, and your tea ritual becomes your daily check in. So not only is your tea a superfood that is giving you nutrients and phyto, you know, well, phytonutrients like antioxidants and flavonoids and like, there's so much like, tea is truly a superfood and it's hydrating you and it's helping to soothe your central nervous system and it's giving you all of these amazing benefits, but it also carves out time to check in with yourself emotionally. So now you're combining a physical ritual with an internal emotional ritual. And whenever you do that, you're getting like exponential return on your investment. And so then you're building this habit in the morning and in the evening, if you want to add a third cup, that's good too, to continue nurturing yourself, nourishing yourself and checking in. And that tiny little habit that takes you five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening will become the foundation of your new emotional relationship with yourself. It is absolutely the first place to start healing now.

Do you find that people who are in just unbearable pain, that that is a hard first, that can be a hard step for them.

It actually is the easiest because they're like, okay, I just have to do one thing. And I go, yeah, you just have to pour hot water over some tea and drink it. That's it. And they're like, thank God. Even in my, oftentimes I'll have clients, especially my, my male clients will say, really like tea. And I say, not like, you know, not like British tea with your pinky out. Like just. We're talking about taking advantage of a ritual and a superfood. And they're always the ones that write me, I can't believe how much this has changed my life. I can't believe I've told, I called my brother and I have him doing it. You know, I'm going to do this forever. Like it really becomes exactly that foundational, you know, those rituals when I, when I help my clients put together a self care plan for them and it's very specific to them. That's why I put them through all those personality tests, all these things, because we have to create something that 1 is effective and 2 has longevity. They'll want to keep doing it because the self care plan doesn't work if you don't do it, if you don't want to do it. And then we also work through any limiting beliefs that prevent people from self care because sometimes even the best self care plan won't get executed if there's underlying beliefs about how it's selfish or they don't have time or you know, people make fun of them, they don't support them. All these things, we work through that. But that t foundation is what everything else gets built on because we have to get good at the small, consistent things first before we jump to the bigger. Especially the sort of one off things. Like sometimes we have to address a certain situation or you know, face a certain Limiting belief. But that's not something that we're going to do forever. We're going to tackle it. But the little things we're going to do consistently forever are where 95% of our healing comes from. Right. The food we put in our mouth every day, the sleep that we get every night, the tea that we drink in the afternoon, the people we choose to be around, that's where 95% of our healing comes. The rest is supplemental. Right. It's kind of like that's your master's program. The rest is your, you know, foundational. What do they call, like, your core curriculum? Yeah. You gotta learn first. Okay.

Amazing.

Okay.

Now, what I'm curious about for you and in your own personal experience, something you said was that it's. This is not something that we just experience once. Like, we will have loss multiple times throughout our life. What would you say? You know, how. How do you navigate? Or for, you know, like, do you have fear that comes up about, how am I going to feel when I experience loss again? Or. Or, you know, how do you manage that fear? Bur brain, a neural pathway. Now, that's like, hey, you touched the stove and it was hot. Let's not go there again. Like, what. How. How do you manage that for yourself and for your clients?

Sure. So, yeah, that's a. That's a deep question. I help my clients walk through connecting with what matters most to them so that they have something driving them that is greater than the fear or the pain of experiencing another loss or another failure. Right. You. So when I was. Okay, so first of all, statistically speaking, if we live to be 80 years old, we're going to experience eight significant losses in our life, and not all of those will be level 10 losses. But when I say, you know, we're not just going to have one, we're probably going to have more than one. We're actually going to have quite a few. There's lots of ways we experience loss, and we're all going to have those. And so we really do need to sort of accept this reality that loss is a part of being alive. And likely the more that we value something, the more vested we are in our relationships are calling, you know, the higher chance of great loss because we only. The losses that we care about are the ones that hurt, not the losses we don't care about. You know, like, one time I had a pet lizard for like a day, and then it ran away. And I was sad for like a minute because I wasn't very connected.

Right, right.

Into my children. It was a whole different level. You know, I also went through a divorce in 2017. You know, the end of my marriage was brutal. It took years to heal through that. And. And it's so different. Like, a divorce is so different from a loss through death. And it was just so many different things. So what I had to decide, you know, because at a certain point, I wanted to have another child, and I had to sit down with myself and make a decision. Was I going to let fear call the shots or was I going to let hope have a say? And I decided that I didn't want fear to be the boss of me. It doesn't mean I wasn't afraid. It just meant fear wasn't going to get the last word. And I decided to have another baby. And I self cared the heck out of myself through that to manage all of that, because it did sneak up on me. There were times when I went, oh, my gosh, I don't think I can go through this again. Or what happens if something bad happens, or. But here's the reality. We are always on the brink of the potential of something horrible happening. We just don't. Yeah, we're just not. We choose not to live in that space because then we'd be crazy. How could we live lives, Right? But it doesn't make it less real. It just means we choose to create a narrative around it or a perspective around it. And so after we've had loss, when it's no longer just hypothetical, we create again a new narrative, a new perspective that's based in our identity, not in our experience, because we don't know everything that's coming down the pipe. And I even wrote that in my book. Like, there are some times where I honestly think if I would have known, I probably would have never. I probably wouldn't have even tried to have children, but I didn't know. And I think sometimes that ignorance is what gets us through. Right. I don't need to know what's going to happen. I need to know myself so that I can show up. Well, I did some life coaching. I have an amazing life coach who's a former Navy Seal, and he's the coolest guy, but he also has this wisdom that only you can have when you're a Navy seal. And one of the things he taught me, he's taught me a lot, but one of the things he taught me is, you know, he said, rachel, why are Navy Seals the most successful Special Forces in the world? And I was like, because you guys are Badasses, you know, you're tough and you're strong. He's like, wrong, wrong answer. Okay, you know, enlighten me. And he said Navy SEALs spend all of their time testing their limits. Not so that they can only push past them, but so that when it's time to plan a mission, the mission is planned within the boundary of their limits. He says the time to expand your limits is training, not the mission. The mission is time to respect your limits and stay as far away from them as possible. Right. So if they can only go without food for 36 hours before they get delirious, they try to plan a mission for 12. Because they don't. I want to stay as far away from that as possible. Right. And just in case things go wrong, you still have a 24 hour window, right, before things get bad. We have this weird reverse view in our culture right now that if we are not constantly pushing in at the brink, especially those of us who have businesses who are entrepreneurs, like that messaging is strong all the time. Push, push, strive, strive. You know, more, more. Test yourself, test yourself. Which is awesome in training, but grief, loss, we're not in training. It's the mission. It's the real deal. So I train my clients to understand who they are, where their current limits are, and then how to function back from the edge. And then as their capacity expands, as their margins widen, when they're more healed and get more energy, then we can expand our functioning. But we're still staying way far away from our limits. Because if we're always pushing ourselves to the brink, we will eventually tap because it isn't worth it. And that's the same thing with fear. If we don't have something that is greater than that fear, we won't do it. Because why? It isn't worth it.

So true. It is so true. Oh, my gosh. You know, last question. And then I want to be respectful of your time knowing now, knowing your experience in the path that you've walked through. What are some of the biggest lessons that you would give to the version of you that had not walked this path yet?

Yeah, I talk about this in my book too. More self compassion, like breathe. Just like I, I felt this deep sense of panic that if I didn't solve my pain, if I did not figure out how life could be okay again, that like it would just be too much.

I just wouldn't.

I was like, I just can't, I can't exist like this. There's no way I can stay, you know, in this much Pain. And I had this deep sense of panic. So I dove in so hard whether, like, I tried to research everything I could possibly find, which back then was like the wild, wild west, because it was either the library with all these books or AOL chat rooms or like blogs like, like, I'm dating myself. And this is a long. 17 years is a long time ago, like, even an Instagram. So what you found was just, just a horrendous, you know, collage of nightmarish things that did not, they were not helpful, they were confusing and they were overwhelming. And then I thought, you know, I'll tap into my, the athlete in me and I'm gonna just run and, you know, exercise. That's what everyone says. Exercise, exercise, okay? Exercise is so important and so valuable, but it is not a cure for grief. You cannot exercise, exercise away your grief. You have to know how to exercise, you know, what types of things to do, what types of things not to do. It changes different in various, you know, seasons of your pain. Right? There's so much information there. But I was like, you know, I'm a tough chick. I'm just gonna run. I'm gonna start doing marathons. And I basically ran myself into the ground with my 3 year old in the jogging stroller, like, eating Cheerios and sipping on a sippy cup for three hours while I'm just like, why can't I run my grief away, right? Like, I just went in it. Like, so, like I was fully committed, which I'm proud of myself that I refused to throw in the towel. But I often look back at that version of myself and say, she just needed a nap and a hug. Like she needed to give herself more grace, have more patience. Like, I was so afraid. Afraid that I was, you know, if I wasn't going 100 miles an hour with my hair on fire, that grief was going to consume me. And that's not how it works. We don't have to like. And this is almost what's terrible about it is it doesn't kill us, it leaves us alive. That's why it's so hard, because we're like, ah, we're here to feel all of it. But I just, I say that in my book a million times. More grace, more compassion, more patience. You will get there, but you cannot do it overnight. And you can rest and you will be okay. Because I, I just spent myself and then I had to recover from that in order to then work on my healing. Right? I set myself backwards before I went forwards.

I feel like, well, that's just like the bow, right? You have to pull back before that bow shoots off. I feel like that happens all the time. It's never a linear line. It's the path might seem like it's linear, but it is not. There's twists and turns on the journey. And honestly, thank God, because it would be pretty boring if it wasn't.

Yeah. No, and you're exactly right. It's not linear. It shouldn't be linear. If it was, that would be weird. And I needed to accept that. I just need to give myself permission to say, you know, you don't have to be crazy. You know, I mean, talk about fear. Like, I was just so afraid, especially for my son. I was like, I'm not gonna have a child. I'm, you know, freaking out. And none of that was real. And I wish, like, the book, when I wrote it, it's the book I wish I had 17 years ago. Like, it's what I wish someone put in my hands and said, here, this will help you. Because it would have saved me from so much of that overwhelm and fear. It would have helped, you know, it would have told me, your son is going to be okay. Right. It would have said, you don't have to go at lightning speed. It would have said, here's some tangible things you should do, here's some things you should avoid. Right? Things that were messed me up, mistakes that I made that I look back going, okay, maybe the right motive, but the complete wrong execution. And we all have a learning curve. No Griever is ever going to get it right the first time. But I really stumbled head first and do a lot of mistakes that I hope my book helps other Grievers completely sidestep and bypass so that they can get to the healing sooner instead of all of the repair and recovery I had to do. It's like I dug myself a big hole and then, like, climbed out of it and then got back to level ground. I was like, okay. You know, I just. I didn't know. And by the way, no one else did either, because, trust me, I asked a lot of people. I sought a lot of wisdom and a lot of counsel and was largely told.

Time. Yeah, time heals all. Oh, my gosh.

Right? Like, I just can't. I just can't swallow that. Like, there's. This is too big to just say, like, time heals all wounds. But then I look around and I'm like, does it, though? Because I. A lot of people have given it a lot of time and I don't.

See a lot of broken hearts, I don't see a lot of joy.

And what's so interesting though is even as an entrepreneur, you know, we see that all the time. We're trying to build our businesses and people tell us like, do this with your business. And we're like, really? Because I'm not seeing like seeing the people who do that, but I'm not seeing the results that I want to get. And I think, I think there's a healthy part of questioning of that curiosity that's willing to push back and say, you know, I want to find the best way, but not always are the best way. Like, I'm not willing to just believe anything that you tell me. And I think that tension between that resistance but also being that like, curious truth seeker is really important. So whether it's in grief, it's in life, it's in business, like, that needs to be encouraged and valued. Right? Like, I hope when people read my book, they feel that sense of validation that says, yeah, you wouldn't take no for an answer. Here's a different way. Not, you know, well, I mean, I don't know.

Good luck. Oh my gosh, it's so true. Right? You know, I always talk about like, get to the root. And I just think that you income, you embody getting to the root where it gets to be both, where I get to live in the. I trust and I'm curious, like I'm going to get to the root. And I just think that's one of the most powerful things and in, in for anyone to adapt in any type of like, hey, when you're ready, when you're want to, when you want to grow, when you want to, when you need support, like find someone that's going to get to the root.

Yeah, well, that's why I'm working with you.

I know, I can't wait. I'm so excited because your, your work.

Is so important and I, yeah, there's a lot of, a lot of reasons. But yeah, that's a foundational one. Like those things can live in the same space and anything. Again, trying to oversimplify, there's something off about that. It's like, how about we equip ourselves to do it? Okay. My dad, so my dad was always full of one liners growing up. And we was like, dad, they're so lame. I use all of them. And one of the things you say to us growing up is he would say, when it's easy, do it easy. And when it's Hard, do it hard, you know, And I was like a 15 year old. I was like, okay, whatever.

Like, you know, okay, don't.

But now I'm like, yeah, exactly. And sometimes things are hard and we should figure out how to do them even when they're hard. And then sometimes they're not as hard as we think and we figure out how to do them a little bit easier or whatever it is. But like, the goal in life isn't always simplify, simplify. Sometimes it's like, no. Up your game. So that when it's a little tricky, you have the tools, you have the skills, you can step in to that. And Grace is the same way. And I think business is the same way. Sometimes it's not about how to bring it down to our level, it's about how do we rise to its level. So true. So true.

Okay, so with that said, I want to be mindful of your time. So where can we get this book? Where are some of the best places that we can connect with you? And I'll make sure that we link all of that up in the show notes.

Amazon. If you type in the Truth About Healing After Loss, it'll pop up or my name, Rachel Tenpenny McGonagall, is what I published under. You'll find it on Amazon. There's a Kindle edition and a paperback edition. And then my website is thegriefgal.com and on Instagram I'm the grief gal. But it has underscores in between the words. So okay. Or if you just search for my name, there's not a lot of Rachel Tenpenny McGonagalls in the world. So you'll find me.

Okay. I cannot wait to publish this and I'll definitely link all of that up. So, Rachel, thank you so much for hanging out with me today, pouring into me and pouring into my community.

I really appreciate it. Oh, thanks for having me.

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