What grief is and why it's good for you - Setting the Record Straight

grief is Mar 29, 2019

When I was 14, my family was in a car crash on the way home from vacation. My dad died instantly.

Everything I thought my life was... shattered.

Two weeks later, I started high school.

I walked into a sea of people, many who had read about my car crash in the newspaper, so they came up to me and hugged me even though they had never even acknowledged I existed before. I felt completely and utterly misunderstood.

And when your world has turned upside down, criss crossed, and backwards, you look for anything that feels like solid ground again to hold onto. For me, that became the acute awareness that I was misunderstood. So in many ways, I thought I was misunderstood, and I WANTED to be misunderstood because at least I knew that was something I could rely on, day in and day out.

It was in the weeks, months, and years, afterward that I learned what grief really is and why it's a good thing, even if you wish things had turned out differently or you feel like the worst case scenario just became your reality.

Conventional Approaches to Grief

At first, I tried all the conventional approaches to grief - grief counseling, grief camps, grief books, grief support groups, grief journaling, and the list goes on - but so often I felt like I was being eaten alive by my grief and these solutions did little to provide a balm. Most of the time these remedies just made me feel more angry at my grief and why I had it, instead of helping me feel better.

That’s because your grief isn't some thing apart from the rest of your life. You need support to learn how to live your life again - not from a strange office you’ve never been to before, but right from inside your life - in the dark nights in your living room and around the dinner table. That's where conventional approaches to grief do you a MAJOR disservice. They treat grief like something you have to get through. Like something that just affects you for a time and someday you will "be over it." I even had people who I thought were friends be surprised when years later I still wanted to talk about my dad. "Isn't she over that yet?" They’d ask.

But most people just haven’t learned how to grieve so they don’t know how to support you. And now I’m here to set the record straight.

What Grief Really is

Grief is a natural reaction to losing something you love. Keyword: LOVE. So that means you have to focus on the love - that’s what makes my courses different from anything else you’ll find out there.

Grief begins when you lose something you love… so that means sudden trauma and anticipated loss, even losing a job, are all part of grief and whatever the circumstance healing is available to you with the right tools (hint: it involves being honest with your loss and not comparing it to anyone else).

When you grieve, you are tapping into emotions that are fundamental to the human experience. In other words, you are the farthest thing from alone. Most people just haven’t learned how to grieve so they don’t know how to support you.

So what? Why is grief good for you?

So, you might be saying, “That’s great. Really interesting. But why do I even need grief at all? Can’t I just skip it? Fast forward 3 years and be done with it?”

Let me ask you something:

Do you know how to spell love?





Whenever you choose to love in your life, you are choosing a risk. You know they could say something that will make you angry. You know that things might not work out. You know that any good thing will have it’s run and eventually come to an end.

But, grief isn’t about the loss of a good thing. It’s not about death in and of itself. Grief is about the combination of LOVE and LOSS. In other words, love is the reason for grief. You grieve because you love.

In other words, if you want LOVE in your life, you NEED grief in your life to heal from when something you love comes to and end or someone you love dies.

It’s good for you because the experience of grief allows you to heal so you can keep experiencing love - over and over again.

Without it, you’d never recover - whether it’s the end of a sports season or the end of a decades long marriage. (again, it's not about comparing what was lost. Grief is the common denominator in any experience you have when you lose something or someone you love that allows you to heal and live again.)

I’ve actually put together the single best way to turn your grief into the source of new direction in your life. That's available now in my free Insider's Guide. Click here to claim it.

Sending big love your way today,



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