After Acceptance: The Sixth Stage of Grief With Author David Kessler

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When we talk about this idea of moving forward from wherever we are, my work isn't self help as much as it's self acceptance. Maybe you are estranged from that friendship, maybe you will be able to repair it, but you still get to accept. I'm sad about that relationship not being here today. Current in that form, I am a big believer in not fighting reality.

That's Grief expert and author David Kessler. I'm Leah Smart and this is Everyday Better. Stay tuned to hear more about the importance of acceptance during the grieving process and what comes after. Don't forget to hit that follow button to get new episodes of our show every week. And if you're a regular listener, thank you so much and I have a favor to ask. Consider leaving us a review so we can keep bringing you more of the conversations you love. By the way, here's how to leave a review on Apple. Go to the Everyday Better podcast page, scroll to the bottom, click the number of stars you want to give us. Then right below that click write a review and add your note. Thanks so much.

Hey everyone from LinkedIn News, I'm Leah Smart and this is Everyday Better, a personal development podc where every week I sit down with some of the world's brightest minds and bravest hearts who use science and story to share strategies for how we can flourish individually in relationship to others and to the world around us.

Today we're talking about a topic that's often not discussed at work but impacts every single one of us at one or multiple points in our life, and that's grief. A few months back, I talked with Nurse Hadley. She's a hospice nurse who is helping to normalize the conversation of losing a loved one. And this week I wanted to talk with an expert who says the experience of grief goes far beyond just death. As he puts it, grief can come from any change you didn't ask for. Now, I'm betting you've heard of the five stages of grief. The first is denial, the second is anger, next is bargaining, Then the fourth is depression, and the fifth is acceptance. This model of grieving was developed in the late 1960s by the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler Ross, who wrote about the five stages in her book on death and Dying. Now, in the 55 years since the book was published, a lot of people have pointed out the limitations of the model, including the fact that it isn't based on empirical evidence, but on the stories that she heard from the terminally ill patients she worked with. The main issue, though, with the five stages of grief model doesn't have to do with the model itself, but with the way it's been interpreted, which has been as a prescriptive model for how to grieve. But Ross herself has said that not everybody goes through every single stage or experiences the stages in order or even experiences any of the stages at all. And as you'll hear from today's guest, who is himself a student of Ross's, there is no one way to grieve, and there is no right way to grieve. My guest today is grief expert and author David Kessler. David is one of the world's foremost experts on loss and grief, and he worked closely with Ross while she was alive, co authoring two books with her, including an updated version of On Death and Dying. Over the course of his career, David's worked with thousands of people on the edge of life and death. And along the way, he discovered another stage of grief, meaning. This is the focus of his most recent book, Finding the Sixth Stage of Grief. David joined me in the studio to talk about how he uncovered the meaning stage, what it means to make meaning out of tragedy, and when it's time to begin that process for yourself. Now, as you'll hear in our conversation, David helped me to expand my definition of grief and what can cause it, as well as my understanding of meaning and what counts as meaningful. I think there's something for every person in this conversation, no matter how much loss you have or have yet to suffer. And if you are in the midst of grieving a loss, there's a workbook for finding meaning that just came out, and you can find that link in the show notes. So with that, here's David Kessler.

When you think about the intention behind your work, what is that to help.

People in the most challenging moments of their life? Breakups, divorce, job loss, death. I can't take that pain away, but I just hope to make it a little easier.

It's funny you say that. I was thinking through the conversation. You know, personally, I can point to one experience of grief that I've had, but. Or actually, let me reframe this. I can point to one experience of death that I've had. And I was sitting thinking, you know, can it be that this conversation is for those who aren't experiencing death, but other forms of grief? So, personally, in the last couple years, I've lost two friends that were friends. They're still here, but we're no longer in relationship. And I don't necessarily have answers for why we are or we aren't and that feels like grief. Um, you know, people going through divorce, I mean, all sorts of things that bring us this sense of loss, this experience of suffering. Can it be beyond just death? And. And how do we sort of. I think sometimes we have to try to justify to ourselves why we're in pain. Like, how do we do that?

Yeah. Grief is a one word that encompasses so much. And I think people do believe grief is only death, which isn't true. I always say grief is a change we didn't want.

It's a change we didn't want. So it can be a relationship change. It can be a romantic relationship change. It can be being asked to move from your apartment because they're tearing down the building. I mean, it can be so many different things. I also think in a lot of ways it is a death. I think of a breakup as the death of a romantic relationship, estrangement as the death of that relationship in that form. A divorce is the death of a marriage. Job loss is the death of that paycheck with those people in that place. So they're all different endings. Usually we didn't want.

So for those of us who. Who may not be experiencing death, but are experiencing some change we didn't want that has caused us grief, it's okay for us to kind of lump ourselves into this category of grieving people.

Absolutely. And one of the things that's unique about the last few generations is we're the first generations that have feelings on feelings. So, like, we get angry and, oh, it's inappropriate to get angry. Oh, I get sad. But people. Other people have at work or this isn't as valid as that kind of grief. And it's like our pain is real and we shouldn't let anyone tell us how to feel our pain, what our healing should look like, what our experience should be like. We live in a society that bright sides people. We've got toxic positivity. Oh, you'll fix it. You'll get back with them soon. It's going to be fine.

Or you have so many other good friends.

So many other good friends. And. Yeah, and I still get to miss that friendship.

Yeah. Which makes me think, you know, when I first saw your book, I was like, oh, my God. Because I've studied, you know, I've looked at Elisabeth Kubler Ross's work and the stages of grief. I always felt like there was something sort of missing. And so to see this made it feel like, oh, there is something else that we can do not to close the book on Anything but to, I don't know, give ourselves. You've called it a cushion. Like, give ourselves a cushion to continue to walk through life with the tough things, you know, not leaving them behind.

And I always have, Elizabeth, it feels like whispering in my ear, going, make sure you remind them the stages aren't linear.

Please do.

There's no right way to do grief or loss. There's no one model. So I always like to remind people that, because I think, you know, the. The stages have gotten reduced to sort of the five easy steps. And there's no five easy steps for grief, and there's no order to it. And it's a very messy process. Any of us who have gone through breakups or divorce or all these things know it's messy.

Yeah. Talk to me about how this originated for people who maybe have never heard of this model or just don't know enough yet to kind of really put it into context.

So. Elisabeth Kubler Ross, psychiatrist, brilliant psychiatrist who was studying death and dying and in a hospital in Chicago. And it's hard to imagine, but there's a time when the dying were sort of ignored in hospitals. And there was so much in that era around death saving people and new technology. And so here's the psychiatrist that took time with the dying and to be a female physician at that time, we're talking about in the 60s. And she would bring people who were dying to lectures to teach the other physicians, which they weren't always happy with. And so she noticed these experiences in dying. I can't believe I'm dying. I'm angry that I'm dying. If I do this, can I have more time? The deal making, the sadness and acceptance piece. And so she came up with these stages that she wrote in her book back then on death and dying. And one of the things I always tell people is Elizabeth didn't come up with something. She observed something. It's literally like she said, I'm watching the sun. It seems to be coming up on the east and setting in the west. I'm watching the dying people, and here's experiences they go through. And so I was so privileged to get to know her later in life when I was working on my first book, the Needs of the Dying, and I would often talk to her about those stages are getting so misinterpreted around grief. Grief. And so eventually, one day, after we had written a book together, Life Lessons, she called and said, I think I do want to formally adapt these stages for grieving. And one of the challenges that we had always talked about is somehow acceptance took on a finality that. Like when people say to me, even now, how long will I grieve for someone who's died? I'll go, well, how long they're going to be dead? Because if they're going to be dead for a long time, you're going to grieve for a long time. It doesn't mean you'll always grieve with pain. I hope in time we grieve with more love than pain. But acceptance was almost thought of as this end point. And I don't believe in closure. Elizabeth didn't believe in closure around grief. And so, you know, in my own experiences, I was like, there has to be more. And that's when I thought about it. You know, after acceptance, there's much more to be found. And I think that's the meaning.

Yeah. Because we're here, I want to ask you how you define meaning.

I think, you know, when I was writing and researching meaning, the biggest misconception is people go, there's no meaning in a horrible divorce. There's no meaning in a murder. There's no meaning in a drug overdose. And the terrible things in our world and shootings. And I think how I realized is that meaning isn't in those horrible events. Meaning's in us. It's what do we do after? What do we do after these horrific events? Not just what do we do, but who do we become?

You know, I think everything can change us, and we have some agency in how things change us.

Set the scene for me. I know you've been through your own experiences of loss that you have talked about, and so I certainly don't want to take those away from you, but also don't want to force you to have to, you know, open any books you don't want to in this moment.

I appreciate it, and I'm an open book, but thank you for asking.

Yeah, of course.

And by the way, I just want to, like, point out what you did. Like, I think when we talk about the world being grief illiterate, we sometimes say to people in grief, oh, tell me the details of how they died or what happened without realizing. We might be asking people to go into their trauma without even pretending like there's a permission. So thank you for doing it that way and modeling that, because I think we do need to ask, are you comfortable sharing any details with me? Cause that is a more sensitive way. Grief sensitive and trauma sensitive way.

Yeah. And. Well, and you said it's like, if there is death in Your life, How long will you be grieving? How long will they be dead? It's like you don't know where you're catching people on any given day.

Correct, Correct.

So you had a few experiences. You had your mother pass away in the ICU and then were part of a mass shooting. One of the first. And your son passed away at a young age. So talk to me about, like, the tapestry of these. These experiences you had. And. And if they did contribute to finding meaning, how so?

Well, no one is in, like, third grade and says, oh, I want to be a death and grief specialist when I grow up. I want to know a lot about trauma. You know, no one, like, comes up with that in the third grade. So I had a mother who was in and out of the hospital. I just thought that was normal. That's what happens. And when I was 13, she had to be transferred to the big hospital in the big city. And so we went there. We were at a hotel nearby, across the street, and I couldn't go up and see her. You had to be 14. I was 13. Like, didn't know to lie about that. People, like, I'd heard, oh, you're in a lie someday about getting liquor. I didn't know to lie to. To get into the hospital. Right?

Yeah.

So here she is in this hospital, and at the hotel across the street one day, someone starts yelling, fire. And everyone runs out, and there's a huge fire on the 18th floor. Flames are coming out, fire trucks are pulling up, and all of a sudden, shooting begins. And suddenly they realize this isn't just a fire. This is an active shooter. And it went on for hours. And it turned out to be one of the first mass shootings in the US and at such a young age, I saw people die and police officers being killed and hotel guests. And then a couple of days later, my mother died. So at such a young age, I came away with so many feelings of, we have to do death better. I mean, this dying in the ICU alone wasn't the best way to handle her death. And there were so many things that could have been better. You know, even in the hospital one day. I did get to go up at one point. Some nurses were lovely and let me. They looked the other way. And then the only advice anyone gave me was be strong, which kind of feels like, don't have feelings. I know men get that, but I think everyone gets it too. And I thought I was damaged and ruined. And as you mentioned, you know, I thought mistakenly, my worst griefs, my horrible Griefs were really behind me and then have two wonderful children and got a call one day that my 21 year old son had died. So as brutal as anyone would think it is, it is, if not more. And so I had to get through that and figure out a way to. To live through that. And that's partly where the idea of meaning came through, because I wasn't just going to accept it. There needed to be more.

So tell me about the process of coming up with meaning. I've heard you say you had multiple words in your head that you talked with Elizabeth about because you both felt this way, that there was something else.

Yeah. One of the things that was so important to me is sitting with so many people over the years who had been through enormous tragedies. You know, death of a spouse after 50 years and a death of a child and death of our amazing parents who were 100 year olds. You know, all these type of losses. And I would see how people found life again and actually found happiness and joy. And so when I think about the idea of meaning, it's like meaning really is the key.

To finding life after loss again. And, you know, all those people were evidence for me. And I hope I'm evidence for someone. One of the things that happened after my son died, and I think we all have to figure this out for ourselves, is after my son died, I canceled lectures. I canceled everything. And then when I went back to doing those lectures and rescheduling those programs, they sent out the same brochure that, you know, was a picture of me smiling. And all of a sudden I got emails and criticisms like, he shouldn't be smiling. His son died and I had to go, hmm, let me think about that. No, my son loved my smile. My son would want me to keep smiling. No, I'm not going to buy into. There's a right way to be for other people. I understand that people can make up a story about that being maybe disloyal to him, but loyalty to my son is living again and honoring his memory and spreading word that there was this young David Kessler that existed and will never be forgotten. That's the loyalty.

This is a little bit of an aside, but I heard you mention a quote, someone was trying to make meaning into a lesson. And I know you've talked about the fact that meaning is a lesson, but I do wonder with the work that you've done, has it shifted at all or has it cemented what you already believed about potentially there being some sort of like, I don't know, higher power plan. Like, when I think of meaning, I sort of think of that way in which we connect the dots that are behind us to find some way to say, okay, I'm okay. These are terrible things that happened, but I'm okay, and this is what led to this. This led to this, and I'll be okay. Like, how do you think about that?

Yeah, I don't know that I find a big plan in it. You know, I can't imagine if there's an afterlife, and I hope there is. I can't imagine seeing my son again. And I, too, want to see him desperately in an afterlife. Seeing him again and him going, oh, my gosh, so tell me about the rest of the 40 years.

How was it?

How was it? And if I said, sad you died, he'd go, yeah, no, of course it was. And I'm glad you grieved for me and thank you. And what about the rest? And if I said there was nothing else but grief, he would go, wait, no, the food on planet Earth was amazing. And what about those people? So many different kinds of people and so many activities. And what about the places? I mean, he would just be, like, appalled if I said, nope, quit eating, quit going to places, forgot about people. It's like, no.

I want to say to him, I hope you were seeing everything through my eyes, you know, because I'm going to see things in this life. And it's interesting. I ran into someone in my neighborhood that I had worked with years ago, and it was cute. She said, I would be your friend, but it would be too depressing to talk about death all the time. And I said, believe it or not, I don't talk about death all the time. It's my work. But, you know, this life is meant to be enjoyed. And so I try to take this life in and enjoy it as much as I can. And part of that is the meaning making. You know, I think we think meaning a charity, a 5k walk, a run. This moment's meaningful. Us talking is meaningful. Talking with you is meaningful. Someone watching, listening. It may be meaningful. You know, how can I take this moment in a little more?

How do we know it's time to make meaning? And how do we know when it's not?

Well, just doing the book, Finding Meaning. So many people looked at the name and said, finding meaning. I'm not ready for that. And then I would say, no, no, no. The inside of the book isn't just finding meaning. It's how to excavate the pain. And then as people would go, oh, and they worked through the book. They were coming to me and go, we need more information about how to excavate the pain. Which is why I did the workbook, because I really wanted to give people tools. Because you have to excavate the pain first. You have to work through the pain. We can't do a spiritual bypass. And there are so many people who have come to me and, oh, my gosh, they did an amazing charity, or they jumped into meaning and then sort of crashed afterwards because, okay, we found meaning, but then the pain was still there. And I think you have to go through the pain. Like, if I could help people skip the pain, oh, my gosh, I would do that, right? And I've learned there's no skipping the pain. And one of the really big things I teach is, you know, this idea about what we run from pursues us and what we face transforms us. And so we have to face this pain. I know no one wants to. I didn't want to.

So once we do sort of excavate the pain, you said meaning sort of appears. And I want to be careful of asking for steps. But what does it look like to create meaning?

It can be a lot of different things. I think the first thing I want people to know is not big. It can be in the moments. Think of it as in the moments. An example I loved is there was a woman whose father died and he had put himself through medical school by being a waiter. And he knew what it was like to rely on, you know, low wages and people's tips. So when he became a doctor, he was always a big tipper. And now that he died, his daughter is generous in his honor. Like the tip she leaves is in honor of our dad. She finds meaning in leaving someone a good tip. So meaning can be those little things.

That are gestures that honor the person. Maybe meaning can be when you've lost those friendships, when you've lost friends, when you've lost people you love through death or divorce, maybe it makes you go deeper and makes you a better person. I hope that the losses I have been through, that they make me a better person.

Coming up, David and I discuss how to support the people you love while they're grieving and what a more grief friendly workplace would look like.

My website we were talking about is grief dot com, and I see the back end of it. You know, I see the statistics. The most visited page is the best and worst things to say to people in grief. And it gets visited the most at night. People are up in the middle of the night trying to figure out how to support their friends.

We'll be back in just a few moments.

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Your long term effort and your long term commitment are supported. Surprisingly important.

Each episode delivers pragmatic advice. For right now, listen to hello Monday with me, Jessi Hempel on the LinkedIn podcast network or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back with David Kessler, grief expert and author of Finding the Sixth Stage of Grief.

So for people listening who are hearing you talk about excavating this pain and not even knowing where to begin, what would you say to them? How do they start this process of excavating pain instead of trying to bypass to something that might feel a little bit nicer, like meaning?

One of the strange things about grief in all its forms is some of our friends and family members are more grief literate than others. You know, you might have your best friend, you might have your spouse, you might have your partner. They know everything about you, they get everything about you, and then you go through grief they might not understand. And so grief is this unique time that family and friends can feel like strangers and strangers can feel like family and friends. That's why we gather in grief groups. I've Got Tender Hearts, which is this big online grief group for people who have had a loved one who have died, where people talk to one another and get support. And if your best friend isn't giving you the support you need in the breakup, the divorce, whatever it may be, the death, just find other people who will. You don't need to end the friendship with them. They're a wonderful friend. Maybe not good at grief, and that's okay. Not everyone is good at it. But I Think we need to find people who cannot fix us because we're not broken, but just be with us.

One of my close friendships is not, we're not friends anymore. But it's actually in part because this, this person experience grief. And I had another friend who lost her husband and she was one of my very close friends. She leaned on me and I knew him very well. She didn't lean on our other friend. And that person took it personally. So I've watched it be taken personally by someone and watch the person in grief just say, I don't know why, but you were the right person. And then I've had the experience of someone kind of saying, you're not the right person right now. And it's not our job in grief to take care of anybody. But what do you recommend for us to take care of ourselves, but also to preserve the things we want to, to let go of the things that we have to.

This is such a world that it's all about the peaks and doing and oh my gosh. And then we get to grief and it's not about doing, it's about being. And it is for those of us who have friends and family members who are going through things to actually say, I don't know what this is like for you, I don't know what this road is like. And I just want you to know I want to be on the road next to you. Even though I'll never know your road or feel your road, I want to be walking with you and I'm here, whatever that looks like. And you may not know what that looks like and I may not either. But I just want you to know I want to be here. We make the mistake because we're not taught to try to fix them. I mean, look, you give me a problem, I got three solutions for you and I would love to help my self worth by coming up with the solutions that help you. And I have to realize, oh my gosh, no, this is grief. I'm just going to like, be with you. Don't know any solutions, just going to be with you. You know, people often say to me, can you please help my sister? Can you please help my friend? And I go, well, what's your goal? And they go, I want her or him to be the person they were. And I'm like, unless we got a time machine, we can't do that because that would mean the divorce didn't happen or the breakup didn't happen or the death didn't happen, there is no going back they were forced to move forward, and so we gotta be moving forward with them. Wow.

I can think of people where I go, gosh, I wish, you know, I had wished that there was some, that that person didn't experience that pain. But I think even more selfishly that that person was the person I knew before.

Yeah.

I mean, this show and my work is all about how we change and improve and all these things. But in reality, so many of us don't necessarily want people to change, whether by, you know, voluntarily or by force or by experience, because we don't know how to reorient ourselves around this new shape of a person.

Right. And it's interesting, you know, there's a whole nother piece of my work that I do with organizations and companies in everything that happens with them is around change. People forget. Oh, if you're a grief agent, you're. You're also a change agent.

Right.

You know that you kind of. You know, we go through these personally and organizations go through this. It's not just grief in the workplace. It's just change in the workplace because there's change in our lives.

I mean, you're talking about work. And I'm curious to know, like, if you could go through every organization and paint something new in the experience of change or grief for people, what would that be like? I've often thought, like, gosh, I wish they had grief policies for chosen family people who aren't necessarily your blood relatives who pass away. Where you do experience grief or grieving, do you have an idea of things that you'd say, gosh, I wish they would do this too? I'm sure you do.

I do, I do, I do. I've been in so many organizations that want to retain employees. They want their employees to be happy. They want their employees to be engaged. And management's been taught all these things, like, try to learn their names and address them by their first name, or let's scoop out Thanksgiving dinner with them. And, you know, all these things that companies have done. And then grief happens. Divorce in someone's life, death in someone's life. We know nothing about it. Let's just pretend. The old way is, don't bring all that to work. And then I'm like, but aren't we saying, bring your whole self to work? Oh, yeah, bring it. Well, that's our part of our whole self. And I always say a huge moment of engagement, a huge moment of engagement is being there for our coworkers, for our employees, for our managers when they have a loss. And I think another thing, in the work world, people have to take time off. We need better bereavement policies, more realistic bereavement policies. The old way was just thinking about, you're going to come back from grief. You might have to make some calls. You'll make those on your lunch hour. First of all, reality is everyone else is on their lunch hour that you're making calls to. And grief takes a lot of time. The logistics take a lot of time. The emotions are exhausting. Grief doesn't fit neatly into three days. But, you know, there's also like, oh, no, no, we were fine with you gone. You were. I thought I made an impact in this workplace. We actually want to say we're glad you took time and we missed you, and you're valuable and you're missed when you're gone and take the time you need. It's not like we can do without you. People want to feel valued and missed.

Mm.

Yeah. You don't wanna hear someone say, no, we've been equally as productive without you. Glad to have you back, though.

Right, Right.

Exactly.

Something I'm curious about with people who are grieving. You know, you started at the beginning of this talking about Elisabeth Kubler Ross and the fact that she was bringing people in who were dying to talk to academics. What have you learned from the people you've worked with who are in grief?

Well, so much.

I think one of the things that surprised me that I want us to know is people who grieve well, live well.

Wow.

I mean, it's not unusual for people to say, who don't know me, they've met me and they hear me in some other circumstances, and they're like, wow, you're one of the happiest people I know. What do you do for a living? And then I tell them and they're like, well, that doesn't compute. And I think I am enormously happy. And all the people that I've had to say goodbye to, I also bring a part of them with me. And I really try to enjoy this life to the fullest.

Do you think about death a lot?

Sometimes. Sometimes not. You know, when death comes, I want to be caught in the middle of life.

How many people die before they're dead? How many people have a life unlived?

Too many, too many, too many.

And I hope I'm actually helping people live well. I hope I'm helping them bring joy to their lives in the strangest way. Because grief and trauma.

Have the potential to end our happiness and joy if we don't utilize tools. And this is the stuff, as we talked about, why it's so important to do. What we're doing right here is to give people these tools. I hope someone who goes through this workbook doesn't come away and go, that helped me with my grief. I hope that someone who, you know, goes through my courses or groups or anything comes away and goes, oh, my gosh, this so helped me live better. These tools and techniques aren't just about the fixing of grief, which isn't fixable, but the living of our lives. And I want people to know, no matter what you've been through, no matter what you've experienced, happiness is still possible and life is still worth living.

Did you ever have moments where you felt like it wasn't?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

And that's normal.

And that's normal. That's why, you know, I do so much teaching around death, dying, addiction, you know, grief, loss, trauma, old wounds. Because all those things are there and we can continue. And I think I, you know, I have come out with so much. It seems strange with all I've been through, but I have such a rich life because of everything. I wouldn't, gosh, of course, if I could make some of the horrible things disappear, I would. And I realize I have to take all of these days together.

So we go through this process. And I've heard you talk a lot about the feeling of love versus pain. So I don't know if you like to use the term healed. You talked about excavated, but this sort of like, transmutation of the feeling of pain into love. Talk to me about that shift.

You know, I think that fear comes up in grief in the sense, especially around how I mentioned early on in my life how I felt broken, how I felt damaged. And I think one of the things that happens in grief is we believe, oh, my gosh, this is the rest of my life. I'm going to be in this pain the rest of my life. Or some of us have horrible things happen and we shut down and we go into fear. And here's the thing I want people to know. Fear doesn't stop death. Fear stops life. Fear stops us from living. And going back to what you mentioned, I don't think about being healed. I'm an in process. I'm always healing. I hope there's more healing to come. And I think healing has almost gotten a little bit like, I've seen people go, don't you call me. Don't say I'm healing. How dare you. And I think that, like, it can feel like. If we talk about the word healing, am I minimizing what you're going through? My definition of healing means that event, that trauma, that death, that loss no longer controls me. I don't make decisions from that grief. I don't make decisions from that trauma.

How do we know that? Is that obvious?

I think sometimes it's interesting to think of how we say things. No, I don't want to date anymore. I just can't put myself out there. Oh, there's some fear there. There's some fear of rejection. I can't take any more abandonment. You know, one of the fascinating things about grief and trauma we're learning is we have the tendency to isolate. And the cruelest thing we can do to someone is put them in isolation. And yet we isolate grief. Trauma was caused by a person or a situation. And we need people to help us with our healing. Not the people who maybe caused the trauma, but other people. We need other people around us. Grief needs to be witnessed. Trauma needs to be seen, talked about. So I think we forget how healing people can be.

It's like the first thing you want to do is be away from other people. You know, you don't necessarily want to be the wet blanket either. You want people to be able to go. Go about their lives without necessarily putting something on them.

And we get to be ourselves. I often say to people, don't try to make your grief or your trauma digestible for the rest of the world. You know, you get to be who you are today, and if that's in pain, then you get to be in pain.

You talk about in grief or what happens because of grief is our ability to sort of expand our bandwidth or expand our capacity. Can you talk a little bit more about that as we come to this point of not necessarily being healed, but continual healing throughout our lives?

Yeah, I think that the more we allow ourselves to have those peaks and those valleys, the valleys actually help us get to a peak someday. I think there is a bandwidth that expands. People in grief might cry a little harder, but they actually can laugh a little harder. I think there is an expanded bandwidth when we allow ourselves to go there, to be there with all the days of our lives, the good, the bad, everything in between.

Well, and I was surprised to know that you said, you mentioned positive psychology and your love for it, and you talked about post traumatic growth. I think that's such an interesting and beautiful place to end this. Can you talk about what that's meant for you in this process? And what that concept means.

Yeah, we talk about post traumatic stress all the time. And so many times in our world there's actually more post traumatic growth, but we don't talk about it, we don't point it out, and yet it does happen. And we can not just go through these things, but we can grow through them. And I think the thing is, you know, I often talk about grief is like the stone. You're going to carry it, it's going to be part of you, you're going to always feel it, it's going to always be with you. And hopefully the grief doesn't get smaller, we get bigger. We can make a decision and we often do, to constrict. After love doesn't work out, we constrict after someone dies, we constrict. Post traumatic growth is learning how to expand.

I love it. I'm going to have you complete these three statements for me, David.

All right, here we go.

All right, you ready? Better humans are loving.

Better work is engaging.

And a better world has.

More love and engagement. How about that? I put them all together. I put them all together.

Thank you so much for being here. This was wonderful.

Oh, thank you for doing it. I appreciate it.

That was grief expert and author David Kessler. Click the link in the show notes to get a copy of the workbook for his latest book, Finding the Sixth Stage of Grief. And if this conversation resonated with you, text it to the first person who comes to mind. You never know how it could help them out. Everyday Better is a production of LinkedIn News. The show is produced by Grace Rubin and Emily Reeves. Asaf Gadrone is our sound engineer. He makes sure we sound good in the studio. Tim Boland mixed our show. Enrique Montalvo is the executive producer of LinkedIn Editorial Productions. Dave Pond is head of news production. Courtney Koop is head of LinkedIn original audio and Video. Dan Roth is the editor in chief of LinkedIn. And I'm Leah Smart. Thanks for coming with me and I'll see you next week.