Pull Up A Chair: Let's Get Acquainted

Read the post below in lieu of watching the video for a summary.

I missed last month’s episode. Life got hectic, a big project took over, and time did what time does. So I figured this was a good moment to reintroduce myself — especially for anyone who’s recently found their way here.

Fair warning: this is not going to be “how I take my coffee.” (Though trust me, the caffeine situation is a lot.)

What it is going to be is honest. More honest, maybe, than I sometimes allow myself to be in writing. Because here’s something I’ve noticed about myself: I can be a little am more robust in person than I am online. So consider this me dipping my toes in — giving you a real taste of how I operate, how I show up, and why I do what I do.

I was primarily a stay-at-home mom when I first started working with the body, my own body, actually, because of low back pain. I stumbled into teaching others by accident.

In the early 2000s, I had a moment in a weekend workshop that changed everything. A woman in the room became emotionally overcome.

We weren’t talking about trauma-informed care yet, we weren’t talking about somatic healing, nobody had written The Body Keeps the Score in a way that had reached the mainstream. I was ill-equipped to support her.

However I knew something, that I had a natural ability to hold space when that happened. So I leaned into it and learned from it.

I’d already been exploring Feng Shui and the work of Louise Hay, I understood there was a connection between the body, emotions, and thought. I just needed more tools to stitch those things together.

Then 2009 happened.

My husband died by suicide in July of that year. Five months later, in December, my father died. My girls were eight and ten. I was forty.

I wrote a post called The Incomplete List of Grief — and at the bottom, I talk about the intangibles. Because what I lost that year wasn’t just two people. It was the loss of normalcy. The loss of my daughters’ childhoods. The loss of a future I, we had imagined.

Hopes and dreams…all of it coming to an abrupt and sudden end.

What I knew about suicide at that point could have filled a cup the size of my baby fingernail. I was on the same page as a lot of people back then; the misunderstandings, the stigma, the unhelpful language.

We know so much more now, and we’re doing better. But in 2009, I had to figure it out as I went.

So suicide became a topic at our dinner table. Mental health, suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety, all of it. We weren’t going to sweep it under the rug. When someone at my daughter’s school died by suicide after we’d relocated, we had the conversation because…we’re not not talking about this.

Around 2014, I started a coaching certification focused on the law of attraction. I wanted abundance and possibility for my girls. I wanted to speak optimistically and clear the clutter around self-worth and confidence (read grief and being fatherless)

But around the five-year mark after losing their dad, I hit a wall. Mental health had become the number one priority, and the reality was that positive language wasn’t always the right tool.

My toolkit was exhausted and empty.

I’d used everything I had, tried turning things upside down and inside out.

So in early 2015, I took grief-specific training. Game changer.

I didn’t realize how much I’d been compartmentalizing and holding grief back because I didn’t have time to sit with it. I had two kids. Things to do. I could not stop and, as I put it, “have a cup of tea and learn exactly what grief wanted to teach me.”

What I’ve learned since is that grief is woven into the fabric of our lives in ways we don’t always see. Sometimes we don’t look at the stitching. We don’t look at the architecture of our own story and recognize that grief is running through it.

Then came the trauma piece.

A random post on Instagram got my attention.

Trauma-informed language was starting to become more prevalent, and something in me said: I need to know more about that.

Here’s the funny part: I didn’t think I had any trauma. I believed other people had trauma. Not me.

When I started doing my own deep dive and working on my own stuff, friends asked what I was doing. I’d tell them, “I’m doing this trauma-informed workshop and... turns out I have trauma.” Their response: “No shit.”

I was like WHAT!? why didn’t anybody tell me?

For someone so hyper-aware, so steeped in mental health learning, so deeply in a helper role, I could not see my own stuff!

What I also came to understand is that what I’d been calling “ghosting my own dreams” was actually a trauma response. Every time I’d get a moment to breathe, to start building something, to show up online and invite people in, something would happen and I’d drop everything.

A crisis to manage. People to hold together. My own goals went on the back burner, over and over, for years.

I did what I had to do. But I can see it clearly now.

Let me be direct about a few things:

Coaching and counseling are not the same thing. When I tell people I work with grief, they often assume I’m a social worker or a counselor. I’m not. I’m a woman who has invested significantly in her education across multiple modalities, and I show up with a varied toolkit: body work, Feng Shui, energy work, trauma-informed training, grief-specific coaching. I make a good pot of soup, and I ladle out what you need.

Unprocessed grief doesn’t disappear. It just gets a new job title. Perfectionism. Control. Exhaustion. Playing small. [Read that one again slowly.]

“They did the best they could” and “you needed something different” can both be true. One doesn’t cancel out the other. Unmet needs from our past affect how we ask for things, how we use our voice, how we move in the world. Everybody’s doing this life for the first time.

Grief is not a weakness. It is not something you can just decide to be done with. I’ve tried. If it’s worked for you, let me know.

Asking for help is not a personality flaw. Bypassing your need for help might be.

Grief only counts if someone died is NOT TRUE. Loss is loss. All of it deserves space. I don’t care if you’re coming to me because you lost a pet, because you moved, because a relationship ended, because a version of your life you’d imagined is gone. If you’re hurting, that’s grief.

Women deserve to be heard fully. Not summarized. Not managed. Not rushed to the part where they feel better.

I don’t do surface level. I’m not going to pat your hand and tell you you’ll be okay. I’m not going to let you stay comfortable, because comfortable isn’t the same as healed.

I will ask the question you’re hoping I won’t ask. Clients have told me they almost cancelled a session because they didn’t want to talk about something and then showed up anyway and said they were so glad they did.

Every part of you is welcome in the space we create together. The ugly parts, the angry parts, the parts you’ve never said out loud. I want the long version. I’ll make us a cup of tea.

Because as I wrote in my notes app sometime in the past — and I stand by it:

Find your voice and fill the silence.

I had to do that first before I could show up here and do this. And I’m glad I did.

“Grief is layered, not linear” is something I am saying on repeat.

And my post, An Incomplete List of Grief, is my most important posts, that backs that statement up and the one I refer to in this video.

An Incomplete List of Grief

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July 30, 2024

When you think of grief, most likely death is first and foremost in your mind. It is the most obvious and definitive loss experience equated to grief. Divorce may be the other life event that you think of. Yet, there are a multitude of other experiences that get overlooked as grief and loss events.

Also, I mention that I ‘ghosted my dreams’, as a response to life and loss events. I wrote about it here, on my second Substack.