Josh TrentIdentity Transformation Architect and award winning Host of the Wellness + Wisdom Podcast—a decade-strong show with over 750 episodes and 15M downloads.

GRIEF: A CHOICE TO GET BETTER OR BITTER

11 Sept 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:15

This YouTube video is a first-person account of grief following the speaker's fiancée, Sophie, who overdosed on her SSRI medication. The speaker describes fearing he might become emotionally hardened like people he observed who hadn’t properly grieved, then recounts a powerful moment at a memorial bench where grief arrived as a "tidal wave" that produced both intense suffering and surprising feelings of aliveness, love, and connection. The clip foregrounds grief as an active, paradoxical process that can lead either to bitterness or to deeper connection depending on how it is met.

Chapters

I was engaged to this amazing woman called Sophie. I received a phone call from her sister's partner. She decided to overdose on her own SSRI medication. It just broke me. Like, it completely shattered my world. I think what I realized quite early on is I'd met adults who had lost someone close to them, but they hadn't really grieved. And there was this sense of, like, deadness kind of behind the eyes or, like, bitterness or pessimism. I saw those people, and I was like, I think I might become that. If I don't learn, how do I actually grieve? And to the degree that I resisted, the grief was the degree to which I was, like, suffering. There was a memorial bench that we'd made, and as I was getting closer to this bench, this, like, tidal wave of grief started moving through me. And I kind of got down on my hands and knees and was just lamenting and weeping at this bench. But as it was happening to me, there was a sense of, like, deep aliveness and, like, even joy and love in the grief. And had I not had the A story of I've just lost the person closest to me in the world, I would have thought that I was on MDMA or something. I thought grief was this hard thing that you have to get through and overcome and get on the other side. But I was having this experience of, like, I just feel love. I just feel so much, like, raw connection and love.