Grief Expert Shares The Worst Thing to Do After Heartbreak w/ David Kessler

Fear doesn't stop death. Fear stops life. Like, take that in. Fear doesn't stop death. Fear stops life. Fear doesn't stop the end of a relationship. Fear stops the relationship. Fear doesn't stop this moment from going wrong. Fear gets in the way and causes this moment to go wrong.

[Foreign] what's up, everybody? We are officially back in Los Angeles after our retreat in Florida. I am Matthew Hussey. If you don't know, for the last 17 years of my life, I've been helping people with their confidence and coaching in relational intelligence. And this week, I'm bringing you once again a clip from a live moment I had with David Kessler, the number one grief expert in the world at my retreat on stage a couple of weeks ago. This was a powerful moment. I think you're really going to enjoy it. The response to the first clip I released of David on Sunday was really, really powerful and moving. If you're experiencing loss, grief, heartbreak, this clip is is for you. Check it out. This has never been seen before by anybody who wasn't on the retreat. So it is my honor to bring it to you today. Don't forget to like this video, subscribe to this channel and hit the notification bell so that this Sunday when I release my brand new video, you are the first to be notified. I'll see you on the other side.

Where would you start for someone and For someone who has lost someone, it's special and important to them in the last year or a couple of years. And, you know, they're coming to this retreat having pretty recently lost someone that would meant so very much to them. What would be the beginning steps in moving through that?

For you to know, you come from a long line of dead people. Like, every ancestor you know, every ancestor you had has died. Like, I know, it sounds funny, and yet it's completely true. You are built to take a number of hits. this lifetime. You are built to take a number of hits this lifetime. I always say I'm teaching people what our great-grandparents knew. They knew to how to be with all of this. We have a society that's taught you not to be with it. So I'm almost trying to help people just trust what's organically inside of them. You know, we all have traumatic wounds. I have a friend, Edith Eager, she talks about taking your traumatic wound and turning it into your cherished wound. I think realizing the wisdom is in us. The wisdom to heal is in us.

I find that to be such a beautiful and empowering answer. Because that idea of, oh, I'm making peace with this innate kind of wisdom that I have that's happened to everyone who's ever existed.

Everyone, everyone.

What about people who are living in this anxiety of anticipation of losing someone? You know, they have a grandparent, a parent, an older sibling, somebody in their life who just, they find it hard to exist and are constantly kind of living in that fear of that happening. And it takes them out of their actual life. How can people prepare well for something that hasn't actually even happened yet?

I always say there's two things. There is something called anticipatory grief. and that is the grief that happens before the event. We have it when a loved one might die. We also can have anticipatory grief when we think the divorce is coming or the breakup's coming or someone's dealing with mental health issues or someone's dealing with addiction. I mean, it's that mind trying to be protective again. So you want to feel it like if you have a loved one who's sick, And you know they're gonna die, by the way, the statistics are in. I've reviewed them before I came here. I wanted you to have the most up-to-date statistics. The death rate is 100%. It's 100%. It's been consistent over the years. They even predict it's gonna stay that way. So, given that, I know you had no idea you'd laugh at like a, you know, but, Given that, this is going to happen to all of us someday. But, you know, there's people in our lives that were like, oh my gosh, they look like they're closer. So let me, that's an illusion in itself, right? Let me feel the anticipatory grief, but let me also not attend the funeral early.

Right?

Who wants to go to the funeral early? They're still alive. So to be present. But I also want you to think about that concept not just for the dying, but for life. You know, just that idea of like, not only about everyone's going to die, but we're going to say goodbye to everyone. That's just a harsh reality of planet Earth. And so if that's the truth, I can either do two things. Like, you know, when I think about, oh my gosh, what if this was my last day? Like, if this was my last day, I gotta like, excuse me, I gotta go say goodbye to a lot of people. I gotta like, make a lot of apologies. I got so much work to do, right? I got a lot of I love yous. I got a lot, right? So many moments I wasn't present for. Or I could go, Well, what if this is my last day? What, ooh, if this is my last day, this makes this my last talk. Oh my gosh, you're my last audience. How special is that? Well, let me not fear it. Let me go deeper with you. Let me make this an amazing talk that I feel so moved and you feel so moved and it feels healing. Let me go there. Let me not try to keep you, stop the inevitable. Oh no, we've got to stay together. We've got to, no, let me be present in this moment. Because you're going to go, I'm going to go, we're all going to go someday, some way. Let me just be present. Let me take it in. Let me make this moment richer. And then hopefully I don't die and like I get another day and I get to see you again somewhere. How amazing is that? And how many of us, you know, in our relationships, in our lives, throw a little invisible net around someone because we're going to lose them someday.

Right?

Lord knows I have this last week. We all do that, and yet let's just be here in the now if we can. That's the real challenge. That's the real challenge.

Maybe this is too personal a question, but Aquarius?

You?

Has this work, is he gonna ask.

Me, do I smoke? Like, what's the personal question now? No, I, I, Go ahead. I'm supposed to ask you.

I want to remove this question from the realm of beliefs about religion or afterlife or any of that, because I think as soon as it gets into that realm, it helps some people and not others.

Right.

Right. Because we all have different beliefs in this realm.

Right.

But if you're able to abstract it from that and just look at it on an even playing field of let's remove that possibility and all of that, has your work allowed you to, maybe you never had it, but has it allowed you to decrease your fear of your own mortality? And if so, is there anything you can pass on to people who maybe spend a little too much time fearing their own mortality?

Well, I think the big thing I've learned about that is fear doesn't stop death. Fear stops life. Like, take that in. Fear doesn't stop death. Fear stops life. Fear doesn't stop the end of a relationship. Fear stops the relationship. Fear doesn't stop this moment from going wrong. Fear gets in the way and causes this moment to go wrong. I think that's the big thing.

Wow, that has application across everything.

Well, that's the thing, you know, it's amazing people like, I have online grief groups and all this, and like everybody, you know, comes to the conclusion about, oh, we thought this was about grief, but this is about like techniques for life. Like this, you know, this is just learning about life, how it works.

How, what is your advice to people who are grieving in a situation where they feel guilt? They feel guilt for maybe not having been there at the end. Maybe they feel guilt for being very kind of involved in their own life at times when, you know, someone was around. and now they're not around and they wish they had given more time or presence or attention to somebody, or perhaps they just have the guilt of I wronged that person in ways that I didn't get to right while they were still here. How can we grieve people when we carry guilt?

I think the same way we deal with guilt in general, and that is our mind Just take this one in. Our mind desperately wants to find control. Our mind doesn't want to live in a world where people die, relationships end, people get sexually abused, people get physically abused, people get neglected. Our mind doesn't want to live in that world and we have lived in that world and we're so afraid of it happening again. So the mind would always rather feel guilty than helpless. Your mind is desperately finding some control. Even if that control isn't true. Even if you think, oh, if I had gone to lunch with them, they wouldn't have died that day in the car accident. Even if you would think, if I had done what my mommy said, I wouldn't have been sexually abused. Even if you think if I had, you know, been less mom and more wife, I wouldn't have been through that divorce. Whatever it is, your mind is trying to find control, and guilt is the false control.

Can.

You say that again?

Sure. Our mind would always rather feel guilty then helpless. Like who wants to live in a world where oh my gosh, relationships could end, people could die, things could go wrong. Oh my gosh, you know, something could happen. There could be, you know, there were earthquakes in LA yesterday, I think. You know, something can go wrong. So I got to attach to something guilt. I'm gonna focus on not doing that again, And if I wouldn't have done that, it wouldn't have happened. One of the things I talk about and I do, this workbook that is coming out so soon, I literally wanted it to be like, I'm sitting down with you and we're working together. And guilt is such a huge piece that I put in there. And one of the things I talk about is something called proximal causation. We believe what happens before the event causes the event. What happened, you know, the argument is why they died by suicide. You know, I didn't drive them to the meeting. That's why they died by addiction. I was so busy with the kids, that's why the divorce happened. Our mind tries to place causation that isn't true. So think about how many times we think about what happened.

That's it.

That's it. What happened right before. And that's not true.

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Sort of.

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What do you say when we have a person in our lives who is incredibly, where the relationship was incredibly complex. Maybe they were a very complex person, or maybe at the worst end of the spectrum, they were a very toxic or dangerous person. How do we grieve when grief is so complicated because of the characters we have had in our lives?

Sure. Let's say it was a parent. You have to grieve and they don't even have to be dead for this. But you have to grieve the parent you have and you have to grieve the ideal parent you didn't get. And here's the thing. Our distorted mind has trouble seeing that. You have to grieve the parent you got and you have to grieve the parent you didn't get, the ideal parent. So for instance, one woman told me about the complicated relationship she had with her mother who did not protect her from the sexual abuse of her father. And I was doing some psychodynamics with her. And I said to her, Can I be the ideal parent? I said, Give me instructions to be your ideal parent. And she said, okay, the first thing you must do is you must stop my father from abusing me. And my heart sank. And I said, Dear one, the ideal parents Don't stop one another from abusing you. The ideal parents never abused you to begin with. The ideal parents light up when you come in the room. They cherish you. There was no possibility of harm coming to you with the ideal parents. Like we can be so distorted we don't even realize the ideal parents would have been ideal. We think, oh, they wouldn't have abused me. Well, that's not ideal. That's like the bare minimum. They wouldn't have abused you. You deserved the ideal ones. And you have to grieve that you didn't get them this lifetime. You know, I remember I'm older than many of you. I watched Leave it to Beaver on TV? Leave it to Beaver said to his older brother, Wally, I have a problem. And his older brother says, well, Beav, let's talk about it. I saw that episode and I said to my older brother, I've got a problem. And he said to me, and this is back in the day before flip tops, He said, I got two beers and no opener. You think you got a problem? I got a problem. I'm like, oh, life isn't like TV. What was the question? If you're taking notes, I feel good. I'm like, I might be doing something right.

Yeah, well, I just, I want to squeeze everything out of this because everything is so, isn't everything so poignant? I feel so much pressure up here to make sure that you get so much out of this, every moment of it. So I'm wanting to make sure I navigate us in all sorts of useful directions. I read in your new book this idea that all grief is love. And I could-- When it has to.

Do with someone who died, grief is love.

And is that also true in situations where you maybe hated the person, or you find yourself kind of simultaneously heartbroken because your relationship with them was so complicated, but you also suffered because of them. And do you, does grief still find its label as love in that way?

I think of all, all, first of all, all grief does not have trauma, but all trauma has grief. All trauma has grief. If you have had any type of trauma, you have grief around it. The grief of the trust not being there, the safe world, whatever it may be. And so pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. You know, I can't take away anyone's pain. The pain often is the love. The love you had for the hopes of that relationship, the love you had with that person in your life. Suffering is what our crazy mind does. Annie Lamont, a wonderful writer, she says, My mind is like a bad neighborhood. I never want to go into it alone. You know, like I live on a street close to like five ATMs. There's times I would rather walk to that ATM at 3 a.m. than go into my mind at 3 a.m. Have you been in your mind at 3 a.m.? Scary. Like who wants to go there? So, We have to separate out the noise, the suffering from the pain. And the pain is the love you shared with that person. The suffering is their wounds, the hurts, all those things. I used to, I remember years ago I would do retreats for Grief, and when I would do grief retreats, I would mix people, people who had a loved one die, and people who had a breakup, divorce, betrayal. Big mistake, huge. So, I would say things like, the goal of grief work is to remember with more love than pain, which is a beautiful goal if they died. But if they just betrayed you, you're like, I don't want to remember them with, are you crazy? So I'm like, oh, you got to separate them. But now I don't even, now I don't do those retreats for breakup divorce, just send them to Matt. But it is different. It is different in a relationship. So, but you know, those moments of love, I think we're still real. The rest is the wounds.

What you just said is a perfect segue to grieving someone who isn't dead.

Yeah.

You know, there are so many people in this room who have had to get someone out of their lives for their own peace, or they have been, someone betrayed them and left, so they felt like they didn't have a say in it. Other people finally said enough is enough and had to get someone out of their life. But, and we've had, we've experienced this among several people already this week, that there is such a maddening cycle of emotions and complexity to this person who still walks the Earth. They're out there somewhere right now as we sit in here, and I'm It's necessary for me to grieve them in some way. So could you speak to that? If someone's gonna be on this earth for another 30 years potentially, and yet you can't have them in your life, or maybe you certainly can't, at the very least, you can't have them in your life in the way that you had previously, what does grief look like in that situation?

So, the first thing I would say about that is I'll tell you a story from the pandemic, because one of the other questions I get asked is what grief is the worst?

Right?

Is it someone who has died? Is it someone who divorces you, breaks up with you, and is alive rejecting you every single day? in the world. During the pandemic, like right away week one in LA, everything was closed down. A friend of mine came over, we walked to the middle of the street, 10 feet apart. We're walking, we're talking, and a young girl runs up and stops short. She's 20, and she says to me, You're the grief guy, right? And I said, well, I think so, yeah. And she goes, My wedding's just been postponed and she bursts into tears. And I talk to her about it. And we have a very sweet, tender conversation. And after she leaves, my friend turns to me and says, oh my gosh, she was going on and on, that's not real grief. Real grief is the murders you deal with. Real grief is your son dying. Real grief is this and that. I went, no, no, no, you don't understand grief. For being my friend, you don't understand grief. The worst grief is always yours. In her life, that's the worst grief that happened. She was dreaming about that wedding since she was probably five. and now it's been postponed. That's the worst grief. And so I think we have to start from recognizing ours is the worst. Ours is the worst that's happened to us. And partly when we go into that comparing, we're in our mind and we don't have a broken mind, we have a broken heart. So we need to drop out of our mind and into our heart.

And.

You know, so many times you and I say it in different ways. The person who leaves you, ends the relationship, was toxic, whatever it may be, is a person who was with you because they felt familiar. They were with you because they felt familiar at some point. And you became healthy enough that you realized, oh, this familiarity isn't a good familiar. I thought it was a good familiar, but it's not so good. And so then, You were hopefully or are trying to release them. And that's hard because it's hard to let go of the familiar. And part of it is we don't realize the life that's beyond them and the life that's possible. My dear friend, we were friends for 30 years. Louise Hay, some of you know her. Louise Hay found the love of her life at 90 years old. Whenever anyone says it's too late to find love, I go, are you 90? It's always possible. Love is always possible. Life after tragedy is always possible. But our wounds Shadow us. Anything came out of that?

Yes. So like four questions that come out of everything.

That's like my to-do list. I have a to-do list that like, I'm about to scratch something off that I did it and like four new problems came out of it. I'm like, the to-do list is growing. What's up with this? Anyway, sorry to give you.

What about people who feel like they're grieving the life that they gave to someone that they may now feel was in terrible error? That toxic person perhaps you were talking about and they say, I gave that person two decades of my life. Maybe I gave them what I consider, you know, maybe in terms of having a family or in terms of raising a family or in terms of I gave them some of my best years. I'm in a different season of my life now and I can't come to terms with how much of my life I have given over to. And it could be a person or it could just be a way of being that we feel we've robbed ourselves of so much life. But that breeds so much regret and self-hatred. for people, especially people who are in a later season of life, who go, the time I have left is less than the time that I've already spent, and the time that I spent feels like it was poorly spent. Do they need to grieve the time that was spent or how should people approach that?

Who says this? Who says this? Who says the time was wasted? And I'll tell you who says the time was wasted is the wounded part of yourself. The wounded part of yourself is speaking. The wounded part of yourself is beating you up, telling you that you have blown it. Oh my gosh. We are here to love the wrong people. We are here to try to grow through the wounds of our childhood. We are here to replicate those wounds to finally heal them. And my gosh, notice if you're suddenly beating yourself up to like, oh, I've been thinking about the wrong way. I've been thinking about the wrong way that I am. Like I thought I wasted things. Oh, now I did that wrong. Just like find compassion there. Like, what if you did it right? What if you did it right? Like, can we just sit with that for a moment? Like, what if you did it right? What if you were supposed to be with them? How do I know you were supposed to be with them? The same way I know you're the right audience because you're the ones that are here. How did I know I was supposed to be with every, quote, mistake in my life because I was with them? And unless we got a time machine, we can't go on doing that. And so we have to like, Accept this life just as it is and start here and now. You know, there's an old saying, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. I get it, you should have planted a tree 20 years ago. And next best time, I think it was Buddha that said that, like now. is now. So I get it. You believe you screwed up relationships. Who hasn't had that thought? Lord knows I have. And here we are today. You ready to have a relationship? Right now we begin.

I love, love, love that answer. I sometimes, I also love the idea that you said about how as you go through your life, you're here to repeat those mistakes, to repeat patterns that you were taught, to see if one day you may be able to emerge from those. And one of the thoughts that I know has helped me before is that often we judge ourselves on a.

On.

A single timeline, which is our own, but we don't judge ourselves on an intergenerational timeline. And to me, actually, the very liberating part, intergenerational trauma is a, in some ways it can feel like a damning concept, because it's like I've inherited all of this trauma from my parents or my caregivers, and they inherit it from theirs, and we just keep passing it on from one to the next to the next to the next. But to me, there's something actually quite liberating about that idea because it also allows us to say, my wounded self is telling me I've done a horrible job in my life. But actually, on an intergenerational timeline.

It.

Might have been that the best we could all do was me getting there by 90. And if I get there by 90, it was 10 years or five years before anyone else in my timeline got there, because they never got there. And so that, to me, is always a very liberating idea. It's so easy to judge ourselves in isolation and go, God, if only I'd have got there by 25, my whole life would have been different. But how many people in your timeline never got there? You might be the pioneer if you get there one day before you die. That might make you the pioneer of your ancestors. That should be celebrated.

I am the most evolved version of my parents. I'm the most evolved version. They didn't get to get here. And I got a long way to go. And I'm still the most evolved version of my parents. You know, when you talk about intergenerational trauma, it continues until someone's willing to feel it. Can that be us? You know, we go, oh, I got so much intergenerational trauma. Okay, well let's finally feel it so it can be healed. We could just pass, oh, I got it. Let me give it to my kids. Or I go, oh, I got it. I guess it's mine to heal. You know, there's that saying about you can blame your parents till you're 30, after that it's yours. No matter who gave it to you, it's yours. And part of what I like to discuss is we're always like, you,'re pushing my buttons. I want to talk about, well, who installed them? Who installed your buttons? Let's talk about that and get those healed. We should record this.

I'm so glad we are. Can you say a few words for, and I always feel this is very relevant to rooms that I speak with, perhaps not the whole room, but there are always some people in the room who are feeling that they need to grieve the children they never had.

That's the life you didn't have.

They wanted that for themselves and they either didn't meet someone in time or that person who they were with wasted their time and then changed their mind and by the time they came out it was no longer possible for them to have their own biological children. So I am talking here about biological children, not adoption.

But.

That is a cause of ongoing chronic suffering for so many people.

Of course.

Could you just bring your thoughts to bear on that?

Well, first of all, my first thought is compassion. And my second thought, it is a one of many illusions we buy into about what our life has supposed to look like? It's a very real extreme example.

Of.

What our life was supposed to look like. And we all have those illusions. I mean, I grew up and I was supposed to be a six-foot blonde. And, you know, for all of us, Life didn't turn out the way it was supposed to. We had a dream and it didn't come true. And now real life can start. Now real life can start. The fairy tale ended. Thank goodness. I don't have to live in that illusion. Now real life can start. I mean, we have all lived in the illusions of what life should have been. I should have a son, I have two sons. One should be alive, brutal, and that's not the life I have now. It's not the life I have. I just don't have two alive sons. I've got one dead, one alive. I can argue with reality, but reality always wins. You should have had kids, and you didn't, or you couldn't, or whatever the thing is. I get it. It's horrible, grieve it, and reality always wins. You didn't have kids. I had one that died. Reality can be brutal. But here's the thing. Freedom is only found in reality. Freedom is found in reality. You know, when my son died, I think about a year into it, I thought about the decision we all have to make around our hardships and our tragedies, no matter what they are. And I thought, I live on a really cute little street in LA, you wouldn't think it was LA, it's this cute little street. I pictured a future where teenagers could be riding their bikes like pre-teens, 13, 14 years old, and coming up to this house and going, who lives in that house with cobwebs on it? Is it haunted? And one teenager saying to another, He was a grief expert. And then his own son died. and he doesn't come out anymore. How many of us have had tragedies and decided not to come out of our house anymore? I get, and my heart breaks that you have had tragedies, and there's still a life to come out of your house for.

What do you say to people trying to grieve someone that, well, two things. That they either have to be in touch with or Perhaps there may be some people asking in the room, is it possible for me to stay in touch with someone and simultaneously grieve them? Could you speak to that?

Absolutely. I have to do this work every day. It's tiring, but I, how many of us are in relationship with people that every day they disappoint us because they're not the kind person, the compassionate person, the honorable person, the nice person. And every day we fight the reality of them not being who we think they should be. and we have to meet them sometime for the first time. Like, there's that place in us that we're like, can you please be nice just once? They disappointed us again. We're just surprised, right? And then we get to a place Where if we work on it, I go, can we even look forward to it? Can we go, oh my gosh, you know, my sister could win awards for being self-centered. No one does self-centered as good as her. My neighbor does meanlessness, meanness like no one you've ever seen. If they were gonna give a Pulitzer Prize for meanness, he would win. And then my neighbor comes out and is mean and I go, there you are. Hi there. But why keep getting surprised day after day they're toxic? Of course they are. They're a master at being toxic. They're a professional at being narcissistic. They've been practicing it for years. Like, meet them. And here's the thing. You will meet your neighbor for the first time. Wow. You will meet your ex for the first time. They'll walk in and they'll make it all about them and you'll go, There you are. I was waiting for you to show up. There you are. I had an illusion. You were the nice one. Thank goodness that's over.

Hi.

Like you can actually meet the person in front of you for the first time that you've known your whole life. Wow.

Wow, wow. That idea, wow. That idea that you're meeting them for the first time.

And it's really hard. It's really hard. You know, like, you know, I was just in New York and I have like one friend who never shows up and I was so surprised that like they were busy again. I'm like, busy again? And then I go, oh my gosh, why did I go down that illusion? Of course they're busy. No one does busy like them. They're great at like, I'm too busy to see you. Well, of course you are. Well, of course you are. I would expect nothing less of you. If you showed up, I would be disappointed.

It's true.

That's one I had to work through in my mind this morning, so it's fresh. Fresh. Rotten tomatoes, fresh. Fresh wound delivered to you right from a meditation this morning.

Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this interview between me and David, so much of what we talked about is material from his new workbook, Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief. It has just come out. It is brand new and it's helping so many people move through their own loss, grief, heartbreak. So if you want a practical guide instead of holding on to it to actually move through it, grab a copy of this book today. I will leave a link in the description. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in this weekend's video. Be well and love life.