645 The Sixth Stage of Grief with David Kessler

Well, hello there. Welcome to this episode of the Terri Cole Show. That was an amazing episode that we just recorded, is me and David Kessler, who is one of the world's foremost experts on grief and loss, which is a topic that I'm so interested in and have been for years, but even more so now. His experience with thousands of people on the edge of their life and death has taught him the secrets to living a happy and fulfilled life, even after life's tragedies. So he's authored six books including Finding Meaning, the Sixth Stage of Grief. And he has this new book, Finding Meaning, six Stage of Grief, the Workbook. So that's what we're basically talking about, stuff that's in this workbook and things that people can do to process their grief. I mean, David's life stories, so much young tragedy and mass shooting and death of a child, I mean, so many things. And for him to have as much joy in his life now is so hopeful. But he also walks us through the process of how love is the antidote for the pain of grief and how we can be more loving towards ourself and others. And in the workbook itself, he's got a lot of self reflective exercises and journaling opportunities and is also giving us an opportunity, which I'm definitely doing that. If you get the book, there's a companion course that you get for free. So he's going to start walking us through some of the exercises in the book because I really do think that unresolved grief is a major problem. So he's a New York Times bestselling author, but he's really just charming and such a warm human being. I really loved meeting him. I feel like we will be friends. So I hope that you guys enjoyed this interview with David Kessler as much as I enjoyed interviewing him.

This is the Terri Cole show and as you might have guessed, I'm your host, Terri Cole. For over two decades, I've been a licensed psychotherapist, love and boundaries expert, and I'm also the founder of the Real Love Revolution and Boundary Bootcamp. On this show, I'll bring you simple strategies based on practical psychology, inspiring expert interviews, and my own insights and observations from my time on the front lines in the fascinating world of entertainment, empowerment and mental health. Now let's get going with today's episode.

I'm super excited to welcome David Kessler to the Cherry Cole Show. David, welcome.

I am so excited to be with you and everyone that's listening to us.

Me too.

Thank you for having me.

Of Course. All right, so let's start with if you were like a Marvel Comics character, you would have some kind of an origin story. So we all do what we do for lots of different reasons. For me, you teach. What you most need to learn is very accurate for my own life. So do me a favor. For those who are not familiar, I was talking about your life and your life's work at the top of the show. But tell us a little bit from your own words, your origin story, like, how did you get here? Writing these fantastic books that help us around grief, like your brand new book, Finding the six Stage of Grief Workbook, which we will be talking about throughout the interview. But tell me about you.

I think it's interesting you mention a Marvel character because it's not surprising when you look at a lot of those characters, origin stories, or even the people we admire in the world, you see they have loss and grief in their childhood.

So not surprising. That was my case. I had a.

You know, I had a childhood that if you would have talked to me decades ago, I would have said it was normal. And I think we all do that. We kind of feel like we have a normal childhood until you peel back a few layers and you really see what's there. But I had a father who was deep in the addiction of gambling. I had a. He had a lot of rage that he took out on me sometimes. I had a mother who was really loving. I think she might be diagnosed as bipolar today.

And she was in and out of hospitals. And so I think one of the things, you know, when we come from all our childhoods, and I think this will be a little theme we'll talk about today. We become other oriented. I. You have to know your environment. You have to scan your environment. You have to try to predict the people around you for your own safety.

We put a lot of armor on. We put a lot of these skills on. My mother, when I was 13, went into a hospital. She was very ill. I didn't realize she was dying. At the same time, we're at a hotel across the street where at a certain point they started yelling, fire. We ran out and the 18th floor of the hotel was on fire.

And when the fire trucks pulled up, which is kind of exciting for this 13 year old who's been bored.

Fire trucks pull up, they start to extend their ladder and shooting begins. It turns out it went on for 13 hours. It was one of the first mass shootings in the US.

And so I watched, you know, like, hotel guests were killed and police Officers were killed, even the chief of police. And so then my father finally got us back to the hotel, only for my mother to die in a few days.

And it was a lot of grief and trauma for a young child who had already been through a lot. And I came out of that thinking I was damaged forever.

Interestingly enough, I also was.

Ambitious and self sufficient. And so.

By the time I hit my 20s, I was kind of like in community college, this highly productive kid who on the inside felt, if you only knew how bad things were in there. So I think that's kind of the essence of that story. And I went on to take a class in community college about death and dying. And I learned about this woman, Elizabeth Kubler Ross. And there was a language to what I had gone through. So that's, I think, the basis of the origin story there.

Wow. So there's so much in that. And how you sort of just kept going, your story just boggles my mind of the resiliency of the human spirit, where, of course, we keep going because we don't even know there's a choice not to, to a degree. But the fact that you went on and then really got interested in helping.

Other people heal, I knew there had to be. I hoped there were ways out of the pain, out of the damage. I hoped there was some healing from my childhood and all those things I had been through.

Yeah.

And I haven't named them all. I mean, I also had sexual abuse and a lot. I mean, it was a lot to kind of come through.

So for you, at this point in your life, how has helping others.

How has that impacted your own wounds?

You know, I tell people sometimes I have a certificate program for therapists and coaches and people who want to turn their pain into purpose. Some of us can walk through the door and go, I need help, help me. Others of us need to kind of, oh, no, I'm just learning this for someone else. And that's the door we need to enter. I think I needed both. I needed help and I wanted to help others not have the experience I had. So for me, helping was always healing. I sort of, anything I learned, I tried it on first to see if it helped, and then I tried to teach it to others.

Yeah, it's interesting. I was talking about this yesterday with someone on an interview where I was studying with Deepak Chopra decades ago, and he was talking about, if you go through hell, right, Something happens in your life, but you learn something that could potentially lessen the suffering of others, that you sort of have a Moral obligation to share that something. And, you know, he was kind of being tongue in cheek about it and said, you know, it puts a karma in your karma bank if you do that. And he said, actually, the reason to do it is because, you know, in a way, it's the right thing to do. But there was something about that.

That sentiment that inspired my own work, that how much of. When I really think about what feels like our purposes in life, it's like helping other people. Certainly being of service is a big part of that. So you say, let's actually talk a little bit about the work that you've done that you've put out there. So you talk about love being the antidote for the pain of grief. So share more about that.

Yeah, we.

We want to get very technical, and at the end of the day, we all need to be seen, heard, and valued. And that's what love is. There is an acceptance in love. And I'll tell you, sometimes people will go, oh, my gosh, my friend's driving me crazy. You know, she went through this. She went through. She's dealing with her child abuse. She's dealing with the divorce. He's dealing with the betrayal or the death. I don't know what to do. And they'll go, well, until you figure out what to do, just love them. Well, that's not going to do anything. I said, no, it will work miracles. You will be surprised. Just love them. And then they might ask you for some tools, but start with the love, because here's the thing. Whatever our wounds are, most of the time, they were caused by other people or situations that happened to other people that impacted us. And so since they were caused by others, others really hold the key to our healing. But it doesn't mean the person that wounded you might be the person that heals you. In fact, rarely is that the case. Yeah, it's usually the other people around us and also the relationship with ourselves, to love ourselves. And I think, you know, I try to make things. Because we all hear things like love yourself and all that, which. Who doesn't have trouble with that? But I, you know, I try to always give sort of practical tools and tips around that.

So what would you say with people? Because I feel like sometimes there's a narrow understanding of grief where it's just death and dying of a person. So let's just establish what is grief.

So grief is a few things. If someone dies, grief is love.

In a lot of other. In all situations, grief is a change. We didn't want.

And I do think of grief as a death, but we have many kinds of deaths. A breakup is the death of a romantic relationship. A divorce is the death of.

That marriage. A betrayal is the death of the trust. A lot of abuse in our childhood was the death of trust. And we have to work to bring those things back. A job loss is the death of that job with those people and that paycheck. So it is an ending. And I think you're so right that we hear grief and we forget all the losses that it covers that are not death related.

Right, Totally. I think also what I've seen in my therapy practice is the grieving process, of course, bringing it into a bigger realm and letting people know there's lots of things that we need to grieve, but even life cycles. I just turned 60 and it's like the whole process of aging, even though it's wonderful and I'm not anti. And I don't Wish I was 28. And yet there's a grieving process of that time of my life when my kids were that age, when those things were happening. You're grieving the end of that. And yes, I'm inviting in and celebrating the beginning of something else. But I think a lot of times with relationships, my clients and I, when we're talking about it, I'll have them mourn the dream of what they hoped. Because sometimes when people get divorced, it's less. They're grieving what it was sometimes, but a lot of times they're really grieving what they hoped it was going to become. And now we know for sure it's not going to. It's like we're mourning the dream of that. Right. The loss of that dream itself.

So much there. Just to say, first of all, I think our world is changing. And I don't want to talk too much about aging, except aging has a lot of loss in it. And it's interesting, when you shared your 60, my first reaction was, oh my gosh, you don't look 60. And I'm trying to change that to how beautiful you look at 60 you60 looks beautiful on you. Because I think so many times what we're doing is we're saying, wow, you look the younger beautiful ages. And I want people to like to think about us beautiful at all our ages.

Yes, right.

And the, the other piece is, it's so true. Empty nest is a grief. When our kids leave retirement and you might be going on just like, oh, we're finally getting to retirement, but it's still it's that change? Grief is ultimately these huge changes in our life.

Yes.

I mean, I grieve the skin I had when I was younger. I grieve the vitality I had when I was younger.

And I always try to say to myself.

Oh my gosh, if I could look at myself at 50 and 60, 50 and 40 and go, you don't know what you could do then. You didn't know your power. I didn't remind myself, I'm going to look at these ages when I'm 80 and 90 and going, oh my gosh, when you were in your 60s, you still had so much going. Just be it.

Yes. I love that. It's funny, I'm so, I've worked so hard in my life to be here now, to not be wishing away like when this happens, you know, my husband is 10 years older than me, so he's 70. And it's like we're both well and healthy and happy and kids are good and grandkids are good and all the things. And it's like I work hard because he's a real workaholic and I work hard to get him to be in this present moment that.

Just an ordinary day, just a beautiful, ordinary day of working and talking and making dinner together. There'll be a time in my life when one of us won't be here. Right. There'll be a time in life when this, that average day.

Will be the thing I wish I had. And hopefully I'll be present in my life then, whenever that is. But I think the.

Our ability to be grateful for what's right in our lives in this moment. I agree with you, like looking back and saying, because it's so easy, if I look at my 25 year old self, I was so hypercritical and what was wrong with my body and what was wrong with everything, you know, because that's an age thing and it's also a societal thing. But I think the appreciation that you're bringing to the fore about be here now.

And when people hear be here now, it's like, wait, well, how do I get there? And I'll tell you, grief is a really big door to enter there. Because.

How many of us in relationship.

Don'T grieve that relationship fully when it ends? And we bring those bricks to build our new relationship from the old relationship. We make decisions out of our grief without realizing it. A lot of us live with unattended grief. And one of the things when I was researching this book was I studied buffaloes. I never thought I would study buffaloes in my life, but buffaloes sense a storm coming and they run into the storm, minimizing the time. They're in pain.

A lot of us got taught, keep the grief behind you. Don't face it, there's no point. And we live our lives with this mild river of misery in the grief behind us. And when we attend to it, we get left with reality. Now, I ran into someone that I worked with 30 years ago who now lives close. And she said at the end of our catch up conversation, she said, I'd love to be your friend, but I can't talk about death all the time. And I said to her, first of all, if you knew me, my life is not, my personal life is not made up of sadness and grief and death. But here's the thing, Terry, that relates to it.

What you did when we let in, oh my gosh.

Life is going to change someday. When I go, holy cow, people keep dying. I deal with this all the time.

It either becomes the most depressing thing I can think of, or I can go, wait a minute, if the Death rate is 100%, if we all are going to die someday, what do I have control over? Oh, that's today. So wait a minute. What if today turned out to be my last day and I didn't know it? I either could do two things. If today was my last day, I got to run and do 100 apologies and forgiveness and I love you, that I should have been doing all along. Or if I'm current, I can go, wait a minute, if this is my last day, what would that mean? This is my last podcast with Terry. Let me make this a good one. Let me take in this moment. Let me not miss this day. And then hopefully I don't die and I go on to have another meaningful day, but to let it in and grieve it all.

That's such a great point. It reminds me of that Tim McGraw song, right? Live like you're dying. And David, I had the weirdest experience with that song. I'm afraid to even talk about it because I'm afraid I'm gonna start crying. But for whatever reason, why cry?

I'm like, my goodness, you're in the presence of a grief expert, for goodness sakes.

You're like, it's fine, it's fine, it's all good. The first time I heard that song, it just struck me so, like, I just remember just crying, just feeling like I want to live, like I'm dying. I want to remember this feeling I Want to be grateful for what's right. I want to be here now, even in the hard things, even. Even with the stuff that's rough. It's like I don't want to wish any of it away. And I really. I brought it into my therapist and saying, like, this is kind of like. My reaction to the song was like, very.

Big, very, very. A lot. And I think this was after my father died. And she was like, you know, is it bringing up those feelings? And then, of course, we, you know, we got to other things that it sort of was about. But honestly, I think it's about wanting to not waste a drop of life, you know?

Now the interesting thing about that is.

And then we go to, okay, let's not waste it. Oh, there's maybe some grief there. Oh, I've been through pain. How do I know that I've grieved fully to live fully? Most therapists do not have to take one hour of grief work to become a therapist. Most of us, the average Joe, just things, oh, I know how to do grief. But I got to tell you, we live in a grief illiterate world that pushes it away. And that's why I can't tell you. I feel like day to day, I give the most basic life tools around grief. And people are like having one aha moment after another. And I thought, it's not that they're not out there. We just don't talk about them and understand. I feel like I'm teaching people what our great grandparents knew how to do.

Right.

And so that's what I really wanted to do. You know, I have a waiting list that makes me feel guilty all the time that I'm never going to get through it of seeing people. And I wanted to create this workbook. Like, if we were sitting down together, these are the things we would work through.

Oh, I love it. I'm so into the workbook. And I love a good exercise because again, as a therapist, I feel like you're right in the way that therapists, in some respects, we can shortchange ourselves because they had to go on to.

Take elective classes if they wanted grief work or take them afterwards. And I'm so grateful that they do and they understood this is a part of life we need to know about.

Right. The importance. So what do you say about when you lose, like, younger people? I know that you have had a traumatic death of one of your child, and I had a traumatic death of my niece. She was just about to turn 19.

Oh, it's just a nightmare seven years ago, when it was like it was yesterday. Even though I feel like I have worked. But how you doing this work? How have you worked through? Do you work through that type of a personal. Like the worst loss in the world is a child, you know?

Well, I had been. And I'll tell you, the keys and the tools are the same. And I questioned that for a bit. You know, after my younger son David died, I had been a grief expert for decades already. And when that happened, there was a voice inside of me, there were people around me that said, you have to do what you tell everyone to do. I had to go to a grief counselor. I had to take my contacts out, put my glasses on, put a baseball cap on, and I had to go to a grief group, Literally sit in a grief group five feet away from a table with my books on it.

Oh, my God.

And I couldn't say to anyone, that's me. I'm that author. I had to be the father that had to bury the child, and I had to do this work. And, you know.

It'S.

One of the things I hope I say to people is.

I was very lucky working with therapists for decades. I would train therapists for decades who came to my classes, who had been through enormous tragedies. You named the tragedy. Someone became a therapist because of that tragedy, and that was their meaning. And they were evidence that not only survival, but happiness and joy are possible again.

And so I hope, now, look, I am going to forever. You know, people always say, how long will I grieve? How long will someone grieve? And I go, well, how long is a person going to be dead? They're going to be dead a long time. You're going to grieve a long time. Not always with pain, hopefully with love, in time. But you've got to go through the pain like my grief for my mother now, who died in childhood. It's all love.

My son. It's a lot of love, but still some pain. I'm still working through it, but I'll tell you, I have found happiness again. I have found joy again in his honor.

You know, So I think it takes a lot of work. And that's why I wanted to put this work down and to make it easy and simple and clear.

Grief work is an inner job that we can do our own. Some of us do need therapists and grief counselors, but some of us just need the tools to do the work ourselves.

Yes.

While we're talking about the grief process itself, just what is cause that's the name, finding meaning. And it's the sixth stage of grief. So what is the sixth stage of grief?

So I'll tell you. First of all, the stages came out of Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross, who was my teacher. And she would be the first to tell you the stages aren't linear. There's no one right way to do grief. There's no one model. That's something the media has done with this. Love the stages, hate the stages. It's kind of irrelevant for many people. They need structure. Great, there is a structure. If not that structure, there's many others. But grief is an organic process. And she talked about.

You see in people who are grieving, Denial, I can't believe they're gone. Anger, bargaining, the what ifs, the if onlys, sadness, the depression, and acceptance. And there's not one moment of acceptance. There's not a big acceptance that happens. But I'll tell you, after my son died, I thought, someday I'm going to have to accept it. And I wrestled and wrestled, and I was like, it's not enough. It's meaning. I need to find meaning. But you need to go through the pain first. You got to excavate the pain. And then people started going, well, that's the sixth stage. And then the publisher said, that's the sixth stage. And I was like, I want another opportunity to remind people how the stages really work and that they're not linear because they've been so misunderstood over the years. And.

I will tell you, I'm grateful to the Kubler Ross family and foundation for giving me the permission to add a six stage. But that's not a mandatory stop on the grief timeline. There is no timeline. So I think meaning. And I was always curious when I was writing and really working through the workbook to help people understand this as they do the workbook, to understand that.

The meaning is not in how they die. There's no meaning in my son's death. There's no meaning in a murder, a divorce, a breakup, sexual abuse. Meaning is in us. It's what we do after. It's who we become after. When we've excavated the pain, what's left? Who's left?

Oh, man, I got chills. It's so true. That's so beautiful. And I think that it's really important that it's not about the way the person passes, if it's about a person. Because there isn't. That isn't the meaning. It reminds me of Wayne Dyer. Many years ago, we were talking about something and he was. Was just talking about the. I was really young at the time, though, so I was like, well, really young. It's all relative. I was in my 30s, and we were talking about being in different phases of life. And he was saying how, you know, in the morning of your life, you're in the acquisition stage. I want to acquire all the things and the house and maybe the partner and maybe the children and maybe the cars and the stuff. But then as you're moving towards the afternoon of your life, we want to create meaning. We want things to mean something. It's almost like we go from the things to the meaning. And I think that so really, this sixth stage of grief being meaning really like, resonates with me as something that.

Is so helpful. And it's a frame that I can understand.

And I think that's so interesting about what Wayne said, and Wayne loved Kubler Ross.

Is that, you know, it's fascinating, that idea that I think on the inside, we are so much still growing as we get older. And it is about learning and how do these things become meaningful in our life that we went through. And on the outside, my motto these days, talking about the things is, I'm striving for less.

I've always my life striving for more. Now I'm like, I'm striving for less. I'm just trying to be more on the inside.

Oh, I love that. Striving for less. Yes, please. That sounds great. All right. Before we get into the. My other question I'm going to have for you, I want to talk a little bit about what post traumatic growth looks like, because I feel like a lot of people do not know about post traumatic growth. And I think it's something that can be kind of helpful.

Yeah, that's really. I wanted to help people with that idea in the workbook to understand that. And I'll tell you, here's the thing. Post traumatic growth actually occurs more than post traumatic stress. But, you know, they say, look, if you arrive at the party intact, you have no news. But if you have a flat tire, you walk into the party and tell everyone about the flat tire. I mean, we talk more about the post traumatic stress, but reality is, post traumatic growth is finding that meaning, understanding. And it can take so many forms. And first of all, it is.

Understanding how they died is not who they are. It could be anything from understanding the betrayal in the marriage doesn't really define the love and why you got married. It could mean.

You want to commemorate their life, you want to finally find your life. You want to do something that honors your loved one. Maybe you want to live a way that honors your loved one. Here's the thing especially. And you can do this with a lot of things. I often say people will talk about their parent dying, their spouse dying, sibling dying. I'll say, you know, look, the reality is, when they died, a part of you died with them.

But a part of them lives on in you.

Yes.

How can you nurture that part? Now, here's where we make a mistake. We go, oh, am I supposed to start a foundation, a charity? Is it a 5k run? No, no, no, no, no. It's the small meanings. Like, one person told me her father went through medical school paying his way because he only got partial scholarships by being a waiter. And so because of that, he understood how hard people work in the service industry, and he became a big tipper. He was always generous with his tips. And she said now that her father's died, she's taken that on and she's a generous tipper to the waiter. So it can be these small moments.

Right. That's beautiful, though, because it's keeping the person. That's exactly what you described, David, is that action, that mindful action is keeping the part of the person alive in you. And that is very hopeful. When you think about how we feel after losses, all different kinds of losses.

What good part of me did I bring to this marriage? Or they brought. Even though things went wrong, how can we nurture that for myself? How can I become bigger? Because we don't want to just go through these things. We want to grow through them.

Yes, we do. All right, I have a question for you that I ask a lot of people on the show. So personally, what has been your most challenging boundary struggle, and how have you overcome it? If you have.

I looked and thought about this question. I thought, wow, what a great question. I have to think about this, and here's what I came up with.

It's going to sound like the simplest thing, but those of us who have tried it know it's not.

I was raised so oriented towards the other person.

And when we're raised to take care of, to take care of, and that just sometimes happens.

We know everyone's favorite food and dislikes, but not our own.

And boundaries became so blurred. Where do I end? Where do you begin? My biggest boundary lesson has been finding me, finding myself, that to know when someone's upset and yelling, oh, I think that's about them. That's not about me. I don't have to take that on. I can send them love, I can wish them well. I can answer their question, but where do I begin and end? Who am I? You know, the interesting thing is it sounds like the simplest thing to say. Find your authentic self. It's the hardest thing in the world, at least for me.

I love that, Cher. But what you're saying, it's so aligned with the way that I teach it too. Because when you think about your boundaries, according to me, they're made up of your preferences, your desires, your limits, and your deal breakers. Right. Your non negotiables. So if you don't know those things, then again, you're of service for all the other people. What I find in my practice is that most people don't know them, but if they do know them, they don't have the ability to transparently communicate them. So they're thinking them but not saying them. Which, of course, isn't the best. So I love that answer. And I think you are right that it's not just finding our authentic selves, like what you're describing. It's we're building. We're choosing where. Yes, some of it is peeling back the layer of onion, but, you know, some people will be like, you just need to locate your authentic self. I'm like, I think it's more than that. I think we gotta make choices and build our authentic selves. But that was so great. Can you tell my audience? Oh, go ahead.

What you just said there, I just wanted to say was so important.

Many people use the word like they were trapped in their childhood and they couldn't wait to leave home. And so we didn't get the tools to work out these boundaries. That's why your work and what you do is so important. Like, we don't know because we kind of learned how to leave, but how do we stay and negotiate? So important.

Absolutely. And it's interesting. I feel like there's a lot of self recrimination. You know, people, my clients would be like, what's wrong with me? I'm so weak. How could I be in another relationship with a boundary bully? And I don't know what I'm doing. And I'm like, you wouldn't feel bad if you couldn't fluently speak Chinese because you really wanted to, Right? You would understand, Oh, I need a teacher. I need a book. I need someone to teach me how to do it. Let me learn the Alphabet. Like it. I would say with boundaries, it's a language just like any other language. And to Become fluent. And I feel like it's the same thing with your work, David, where it's like understanding. No one taught us how to grieve, and so you're teaching us how to do it. But we don't need to feel bad because we feel awkward around someone who just lost someone and we don't know what to say. Or because someone just got diagnosed with an illness and we're like, well, what do I do? It's okay.

We didn't talk about that. Grief happens before death. That's the anticipatory grief.

Let's discuss. We're not in a rush.

That's a grief that happens, is the grief before death. It's called the anticipatory grief. Elizabeth Kubler Ross called it preparatory grief. Then we talked about it as anticipatory grief. And, you know, we can have anticipatory grief around the divorce, knowing it's coming, around the breakup, around the death. There's grief ahead of time, too.

What's interesting about that, David, is that I find that for me, anticipatory grief guides my behavior in some ways. So my mother is 87, and she's fully independent, lives alone, drives herself. She's fine, does her own shopping, does her own thing. But she was diagnosed with cancer. Over the pandemic, she's better. But it was like a hellacious two years. And I see her every week, I talk to her every day. But anytime I don't, let's say I'm tired, I don't feel like driving the hour and a half to go see her or whatever. I go, you know, I go out of my way. One of my sisters lives close, so we go together. But it's like, I'm thinking, jani is not going to be here forever. Like, this is a gift, an opportunity, a blessing, an honor. You get to spend another breakfast with her. Shut up and get in your car and go. Like, I know I'm never going to regret it, but I think it's interesting. I don't know if thinking about the fact that it's going to change and she may live another 10 years, who knows? But is that anticipatory?

Yeah. And, you know, the thing is, and I'm sure you do this, and to also know on those days when you are just really too tired, maybe you do let yourself off the hook and know you get to be human and you get to be tired. But I always say to people around a loved one, dying, like you're thinking someday, is we have two things to do Be present for that anticipatory grief as you are, not run from it. And then I tell people, don't attend the funeral early.

Yeah, they're still here.

They're still alive. Have that life with them.

Oh, I love that so much. Don't attend the funeral early. It's so true. You're like, it's just like with clients who fear things and think about all the worst case scenarios. And I always say, hey, how about we just do that once if it happens? Like, if it may not, why we got to go through that thing 10,000 times blasting cortisol through your system for a situation that may never come to mindlessly?

I tell you, when people do that catastrophizing, I'm like, ding, ding, ding. Clue of unattended grief. There's often some unattended grief there because we catastrophize, because we've had a catastrophe. Ooh. I always say, I never get a headache. I only get a brain tumor. That's my world. So I have to regulate myself.

So what do you say, though, for people who are catastrophizers and there is unintended grief, let's just say what would step one be for them to try to locate what it is that they have not attended to.

Step one would be paying attention to how we say.

What'S wrong with me? Why is this still here? All those questions, like you say we talk so horribly to ourselves, instead to go, if we can, as soon as we can.

Wow, I. I'm making up the worst scenarios. I'm so curious. What's that about? Use curiosity instead of judgment. Do a little time traveling back and see what that is. Curiosity will take you there. You know when people say to me, and I talk about this in the workbook, when they say, I don't know what to work on, say, what are your triggers? Your triggers are a map of your pain, your grief, your trauma, and your healing.

Oh, my God, just mic drop fact. That is such a fact. All right, you guys, the book, you gotta go get it. Called Finding Meaning the six Stage of Grief. Workbook Tools for Releasing pain and remembering with love. And I wanted to ask you, where can people find you? And I know you have something else going on along with the book, so tell us.

People who order the book, especially around now, there's going to be a free companion class. They get with it. So I'm going to do some of the exercises with you. You're not just going to have to start this book alone. We'll do some together. So they can always find me@grief.com to go directly to the book. To see it at all your booksellers, go to griefbook.com griefbook.com or grief.com and I'm on Instagram and TikTok and all those places. Usually it is. I am David Kessler.

Yes, you are. All right, my friend. This was so great. I super appreciate you and the work that you're putting out there in the world. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Right back at you, Terry. Thank you.

Hey, if you like this episode or you're a fan of the show and you want to more, please follow me on social media.

Sign up for my weekly love note or check out my website for all the news at fit to print@terricole.com thank.

You so much for listening.

I hope you have an amazing week and as always, take care of you.