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The Thais Gibson Podcast
How to Process Grief from A Loss of A Pet or Loved One (Personal Share)
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When grief is really fresh, we need to be able to sit with ourselves. We need to be able to let those emotions come up and we need to fully feel them. My dog's name was Simba. Maybe we'll put some pictures here of him, but he was the best dog. I'm sure everybody says that about their dog, but I just loved him so much. He was there for me through a really important part of my life when I was recovering and changing my life around and was a huge grounding sort of anchor in that period of time and I think was, you know, truly a bit of an angel to me. Grief can be sadness, but it can also be anger, guilt, it can be anxiety, it can be shame, it can be numbness, and it can definitely be longing. Her name is Thais Gibson. Thais Gibson. Thais Gibson. Tyce Gibson. Tyce Gibson. Thais Gibson. I hope I pronounce her name properly. Ty Gibson. I am so excited for you to be here with me today. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to today's video which will be a very human masterclass on grief. And when I say very human masterclass on grief, I mean that I'm pretty fresh into grief. So I lost my little pup, my dog, about seven days ago. And I'm going to take you through my first hand experience of this. And I don't have this structured in a super planned way, but I definitely have a lot of structures in my mind that I have been trained in and use when it comes to grief. And that honestly have helped me tremendously over the past seven days. And I wasn't actually going to make any video like this at all. But I was on Facebook last night and checking something in one of our Facebook groups and I saw a post come up about somebody who'd recently lost a pet and that they were just like on the floor in grief. And it had been three weeks and they were still crying every day and wandering around their house aimlessly. And I just proceeded to read the post and follow the thread and just see all of these comments from other people who had gone through like that and how they process and how hard it was for them. And I felt this sadness and empathy for those people and obviously my own grief is pretty fresh and just felt this sense of like, oh my goodness, how lucky am I to have tools for something so difficult and how am I not sharing these tools? And so rather than this being a masterclass from the framework of like A, B, C, D, E and everything all lined up properly, I definitely have five steps I'M going to take you through, but I'm actually going to share from a very personal experience. Seven days fresh into losing my dog. He was with me for 15 and a bit years. I loved him so dearly. He slept in the bed with us every night, me and my husband. He, you know, take you through the story, I guess first. And then I'm actually going to take you through how I've processed grief in my own life. And I really just truly sincerely hope with my whole heart that this is something that helps you if you've lost a pet or an animal and felt like, hey, why are there no tools for this or no resources for this, or if you've lost a loved one, like, this is not just for pets. This is actually a framework that I'll take you through that I did through a lot of training in post traumatic growth and research into the neuroscience of how we grieve and what grief actually is. And I'm going to take you through all of that. Okay, so I'll take you through the good stuff, but I'll, I'll take you through just the human experience of it. Because honestly, like, I find when somebody's really grieving, it's very hard to even hear things that are very formal. And I don't want this to be some sort of formal thing. I want this to be like a human thing. Because grief at the end of the day is about, about our humanity. Like, it's a very human, raw, real experience. So I'll take you through this 30 minute masterclass. I'm gonna try to keep it about 30 minutes. And my genuine hope is just this is something that you get the opportunity to go through now and move through the steps that'll take you through. We'll go through five main pillars of how to actually process grief. And I'll just use myself as the example and what I've been doing and how that's worked for me. Again, I've taken thousands of people through this in regards to clients and we have a class on grief inside pds. But I'm gonna take you through my. So you can see it firsthand and you can really see that sort of analogy of things. And this is something I want you to bookmark to keep if you ever need it. I want you to be able to have the resources to be like, okay, when I'm in the depths of grief, here's what I can actually do to support myself, to love myself, to be with myself in that process. Okay, so I'll give you a backstory first, because I will use myself as sort of the human experience of this. The backstory is that I got a dog 15 and a bit years ago. It was during a really hard time of my life. And my dog's name was Simba. Maybe we'll put some pictures here of him, but he was the best dog. I'm sure everybody says that about their dog, but I just loved him so much. He was there for me through a really important part of my life, when I was recovering and changing my life around and was a huge grounding sort of anchor in that period of time, and I think was, you know, truly a bit of an angel to me. And then through my life in all of these seasons, all of these different chapters, where I grew or learned or changed or built or, you know, when I met my husband 11 years ago, and he's been, like, a cornerstone of so many parts of life in general. And so about three years ago, two years and eight months ago, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. It's very common for his breed. And he was diagnosed because we got home from a wedding, my husband and I, and he suddenly had all of these what are called cluster seizures, which are just seizures back to back to back. And we got to the ER that night and they said, like, you're not going to be able to save him. You're going to have to put him. My husband, thank goodness to him for him, because I actually was, like, in so much shock for how bad the seizures were and how they just wouldn't stop happening that I was like, okay, like, let him not be miserable. That's okay. My husband was like, no, no, don't give up. And thank goodness, because I'm not really the personality type that ever gives up. I'm sort of, like, relentless to a fault, probably. But I think I was in so much shock anyways, my husband actually found this really amazing treatment that was radiation for him in a very specific dose in a very specific way. It's called stereotyp Tactical radiation, or srt. And it really helped him. And we were able to get the seizures under control. He stayed the night in the er. We were able to get the seizures under control. And we went through these two bouts of doing this a couple years apart. And lo and behold, our dog actually survived another two years and eight months, which was like, a miracle. However, every so often, he would have seizures. You know, it was something we always had to be worried about. And he would sleep in the bed with us, so we didn't want him to fall off the bed. So for, like, two years and eight months, wherever we traveled with him, we. We could only drive. We couldn't fly because it was too much pressure on his brain with a brain tumor. Wherever we traveled to, if we had to travel for work or anything, we would take the mattress off the bed frame, and we would sleep with the mattress on the floor for, like, two years and eight months. And my husband and I don't have kids yet or anything, but we're gonna start that. That process this year. And so, interestingly, we lived on the floor of our House of our Bees, or wherever we were, a hotel. We would take the mattress off the hotel bed and squish it into the corner of the room and just so we could, you know, like, we just really, really loved our. Our dog and, you know, treated him like a kid. And I know that that's something that's really common for so many people. And I do just want to say here, by the way, like, I guess as a disclaimer, that I am also not pretending that this video or this moment of me losing a dog is the same thing as losing a parent or a. Like, of course, this is, like, me just sharing my real experience so that it's relatable. And I guess that I can be the example so that when I try to map out all the steps, you can see it and see how. Okay, she said it this way in her experience, so that means this for my experience, you know what I mean? But I know that there's bigger forms of grief. Don't get me wrong. But these tools will still work profoundly for those forms of grief. And these are tools that I worked with, with other people, with clients, with people in our programs to do this. So I just wanted to say that, you know, at the end of the day, like, we love our dogs like family members, but I know that there's definitely harder forms of grief that people experience. So. And I've gone through other loss as well in my life, like, other pretty big losses. So this is just the recent one and a very deep one. This one was a big deal for me. So, long story short, we loved him. We kept doing all these amazing things to prolong his life. We put him on the ketogenic diet and learned that cancer lives off of glucose and glutamine. And we tried to reduce those sources. We tried all these naturopathic treatments along with sort of western medical typical treatments that you see, and we combined them, and we had great success for something where they were like, yeah, you're going to be lucky if he makes it till tomorrow. We got two years and eight months. It was kind of a miracle. And ultimately he badly herniated a disc in his back and he was in severe pain and the tumor was growing and we didn't get approved to do radiation again. And it just, he was in immense pain. And at the end it was time for him. So that's the sort of backstory I also want to acknowledge before I tell you, like what I did and how I'm working on this. I also want to acknowledge that I do think that for me, because it was a drawn out dynamic. There were definitely many times over the past three years almost that we thought he passed from like a really bad seizure and we didn't know if he was alive. And there's definitely lots of like kind of scary moments. So I, you know, in a sense you kind of grieve during a really hard thing like that where it's drawn out and you see the person suffering. But then he would be great when he wasn't having seizures for a while and then he had, you know, some other things going on at the same time over time. But I do think that grief is different in different cases. Sometimes a sudden loss is so much more difficult all at once and grief hits you so much harder. And at the same time, people who have ever experienced, who might be watching this, these kind of more drawn out losses where you have lots of ups and downs, you don't know if they're going to survive, that's hard in its own Right. Right. And so, you know, there's different ways that we tend to experience grief. So what's happened for me, and I'm going to take you through five steps that I've been using on myself. After learning a lot about grief and trialing and erring a lot of these things on myself, and then of course, working with these frameworks with other people over the years. I'm going to take you through five steps that are very, very profoundly helpful because I think that we misunderstand grief. And the very first thing I want to start by even saying before we get into like the definition of grief and the sort of masterclass part of this is that grief, when we look at grief, it's not about a person's physical form. Okay, so here's your theme for the webinar for the masterclass. Grief is not about somebody's physical form, if that physical. And this is kind of a terrible example, but I just, I really want to make this clear because this will open up your ability to process grief differently. If somebody's physical form is here, but they're not physically alive, it doesn't make it very much better. Right? Like you're not like, okay, if I have the physical body of the person, but the person's not alive. It doesn't. You're still grieving. You're still grieving dramatically. It's not helping. It may even make things more confusing or strange. Like grief is the void that is left behind from all of these non physical things. And in particular it's needs that somebody brings into your life. It's the identity. This is a really important one. We're getting into these in a lot of detail. These are some of our pillars. The identity that you express when you're in relationship to them. Okay, that's a really big deal. Again, we'll come back to that. And it's the attachment to those things and how they make us feel that when we lose the person, those aspects of our self go with them. We don't get the needs met by the person or the animal or the pet. We don't get the identity. Sometimes we express a certain part of ourselves like we're a caretaker or a contributor or we get to express a lot of love because that person makes us feel love. And we actually are the ones experiencing the expression of our own love, which is a beautiful thing to experience. And then when that is taken away, it feels like grief is love with nowhere to go. Okay, and that's a quote that I read in a book once and it says grief is love with nowhere to go. And it feels like we lose that part of ourselves. So grief, let's define it. And then I'm going to take you through five pillars. Okay, so grief is the mind and body, or really the mind's the reflection of the mind and the body. Those are your emotions, your mind and body response to losing someone or something that deeply mattered to you. Grief can be sadness, but it can also be anger, guilt, it can be anxiety, it can be shame, it can be numbness, and it can definitely be longing. Okay, so a lot of those things are going to be a part of that experience. We tend to have specific thoughts that go with grief. Like as we go through the stages of grief or sometimes we're in denial, right? Or we're in anger or bargaining. So we can have these sort of themes where we have thoughts that are producing those states. And I'm going to break that down for you. And then of course we have the sensations in Our body, AKA the emotions that are following those things. So, you know, tightness in our chest or fatigue, fatigue, sometimes a low mood or just a sense of heaviness all over your body, worries about the future. And then we obviously have certain behaviors that follow. So we may cry, we may retreat. Obviously every person deals with grief in very different ways. You may try to keep yourself really busy or be restless or feel very quiet and not want to talk. Like there can be all these sort of different themes. Okay, so that's what grief is. Honestly, the way I like to define grief in these terms is truly that grief is love with what we are perceiving has nowhere to go. Okay. And that's where we're gonna dive into this in a little more detail and we're gonna talk about how to actually heal that void within you so that you can process grief more quickly. So here's the very first thing I want you to understand is that grief needs to be expressed. And this is where I'll tell you my personal shares here. You need to be able to, when you feel that sadness or heaviness in your body, ask yourself, like, what do I need to process right now? Of the most important. And this is step number one for processing any grief. First step is you need to practice self attunement. And this is that first stage where when grief is really fresh, we need to be able to sit with ourselves. We need to be able to let those emotions come up and we need to fully feel them. Okay. A lot of times when people don't, and I'm speaking more now from everybody else's experience that I saw this with, I'll tell you mine in just a second. I saw a lot of clients that I'd work through with them on grief. And people who were struggling to process grief usually came to me because they had never done step one properly. In other words, they had never fully felt their emotions. They tried to repress them, they tried to stay busy or avoid or numb out. And then you can't actually progress through the other stages properly if you're not making room for stage one. Okay, so stage one is to fully feel. It's to do somatic processing work. And I'm going to tell you how I've done this in my own life and then this will make sense for you. So for me, we got home from the hospital, the first thing my husband and I did is we sat down and we went through all these photos and videos of our dog and we just cried. Like, we just sat with it and cried and said what we're gonna miss, and talked about memories and our favorite times and the hard times. And to be honest, actually really helped because not only did we, like, really fully feel, and we did this a few times, we still do this. Like, this will be going on on and off for a while, but it's, like, so much lighter already from doing this properly. And it was actually really helpful. One of the big things was that when we went through and we looked at all these old pictures, new pictures, you could see that over the past two and a half years, two years and eight months, that he had slowed down so much, and he was sleeping way more, and he wasn't going on walks as much, and he was way more tired, and then obviously had this pain and he was having more seizures and stuff. And so it also just helped us really kind of make peace with the fact that, like, hey, this is the dynamic. This is how he's experiencing things. This was time. It was his time. Maybe it was his time even earlier. And we kind of stuck it out and didn't give up for long enough. And it just helped us really see that fully. That was the first thing. We proceeded to do that the next three nights in a row. And it was really nice to do that. It was very sad and. But it was very cathartic because we got to sit there and, like, feel that sense of, like, fully processing. And we both cried a lot together. And it was just like, really let us, like, feel and get that out. Another thing that I've been practicing on this step one is throughout the day, sometimes I'll think of him. You know, you have these human moments where I'll come downstairs from a work meeting and usually go downstairs and pick up my dog and sort of carry him around. And I have this deep, subconscious pattern around it where I think of him in my mind. Or I'm making dinner and I'm thinking of how Simba wants to eat something, and he's usually begging for food. And you have this snapshot. And I know each of you know what I'm talking about. Who've ever been through grief where you have this moment of, like, and maybe for you it's a pet, but maybe for you it's a parent. You're like, oh, this happened. I should call my parent. And you freshly lost a parent. Or, oh, this happened, Maybe I should call my friend. And you lost a dear friend. Like, we have these human moments, and that usually creates a sense of heaviness. And what's actually happening is You. You have this moment where you're used to connecting to this person or pet, and then you realize they're not there. And if you actually slow grief down in really slow motion and you can observe your mind as it's happening, you first have the thought that, oh, they're not here, they're gone. And that thought creates this deep sense of sadness, like, oh, I don't have access to them. And that may also create a sense of powerlessness or longing for what we feel like we don't have, that we cherish so much. And it's in the thought and perception or noticing of that that then it creates these very sad and heavy sensations in our body. And I'm telling you that for a reason, because we're going to come back to that in a little bit, and that's going to be a pillar of our processing. So, you know, throughout the day, I'll have moments where I feel this sort of heaviness in my body, and the first thing I'm doing is somatic processing. So I'm taking the time to actually feel about it. Like if I have a moment or if I'm on a meeting and I need a moment, I just go off for a minute. And I know that that's easy for me because I work for myself, but there's also been times where I've had to park it and come back to. And that's okay, but it's to be with yourself. I want you to think of, like, being with a wounded child in pain. Like, if a child is sad, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna ignore them? Are you gonna get really busy and not notice them? Are you going to diminish them or shame them for being sad about a loss? No. As a good parent, you're gonna sit there and you're gonna be present with them and maybe give them a hug or comfort them, and you're gonna truly be with their emotions. And so that's what I would challenge you to do with yourself, is to be with yourself. Notice the sensations in Take a beat, take five minutes, and practice just sitting with them and witnessing them. And the more you're able to witness your emotions. What's really beautiful is the more present we are with our emotions, the more they're able to sort of somatically pass through. And you'll notice your mind wants to go into all of these stories. It wants to say, you know, they're not here. You know, the stories are very different for everybody. Sometimes there's stories like, this isn't fair. Sometimes there's stories like, I have no control. Why did this happen to me? Sometimes there's stories like, oh, I'm abandoned. I'm alone. Sometimes there's stories. And a lot of these stories are going to be based on your attachment wounds, quite honestly. But a lot of people have different stories here. Okay. And for me, I noticed my story coming up like, oh, like, it just sucks so much that I can't connect to him. I felt this sense of being disconnected and feeling a little bit like I had no control to do that. And I just. I kept coming back to the story like, oh, I'm really gonna miss him. I'm really gonna miss him. That was a much lighter story because I've done a lot of core wound reprogramming work. Okay. For those of you who followed this channel for a while, I talk a lot about rewiring your core wounds, but I want you to know that your attachment wounds will be projected into your losses. So if I was fearful, avoidance still, I probably would have had, like, stories like, I'm abandoned. I'll never feel love like this again. For a little animal, this is a cruel situation that the world is set up this way. I would have had more intense stories, or I would have really ruminated around helplessness or powerlessness. But I've done a lot of that work on the types of core wounds that would sponsor those types of thoughts. And so this is really going to pull me to pillar number two, which is I really, really want for you. This is part of why grief has been so much easier for me this time around than times I've experienced it in the past. I really, really need you for yourself, please, to take the time to be like, what are my stories? We're going to go down a rabbit hole here for a moment, but there's some really important pieces. This could be a loss of a family member that you're experiencing. But we go into these stories of, like, oh, nobody will love me like this. I am unloved, or, oh, my gosh, nobody will ever care this much about me. I am unimportant to other. You know, a lot of the things where I see grief just being excruciating for people is they're like, why didn't I talk to this person more? Something is my fault, or, why didn't I make more of an effort in my life with this person? I'm a bad person for not doing that, or, if only I knew this, I would have done that. And there can be a lot of These thoughts of regret, remorse, a lot of self guilting guilt, like you're already grieving. So for people who add guilt to their grief, which is a very common experience, like, please give yourself some grace, like sit down if you're guilting yourself, I should have done this. Why didn't I do this? Those you're already grieving now, you're just like out of the frying pan into the fire. You're just making the whole process of processing grief so much harder. And so what I would always encourage people to do, and this is one of those things that I personally didn't have to do very much of. And it made my grief a lot easier to cope with and deal with. But I've had to do this in the past before. Doing a lot of this work that I do now is write out all your stories, all of those thoughts that you're having that are like, I should have done this thing or I should have been more present as a parent or as a child, you know, the son or daughter of my parents, or depending on who you've lost, okay? Or I should have been a better sibling or a better friend, like whoever it is that you've lost. You're going to have stories directed to things like that. I want you to, to put them on paper. It's where they belong. They do not belong in your mind. They belong on paper. So that you can move through them. Until you actually put them on paper and start to move through them. They will prolong your grief forever. Okay? You can literally grieve for a lifetime by carrying stories like that. So I want you to put them on paper and then I want you to really question those stories. Okay? And what that looks like is first asking yourself, can I really know that that's true? Once I fully lost Simba, okay, I fully lost Simba. And he's. He's gone. He's completely gone. And I actually sat with that one because I recognized that that was creating this heaviness in my body. And I was like, okay, we fully lose somebody. Can I even know that that's 100% correct? And I sat with that. And what came up for me was a few things. Number one, well, I obviously, I personally have a good relationship to God. I really believe in God, so that helps. So I'm like, his soul goes on, you know, and that obviously makes things a lot easier. You don't have to have a relationship to God to do work on grief. You don't have to be sure about anything to do work on Grief or to have relief. The second thing that you can do, and this is the second part of what I recognized in my own story, was, okay, he's fully gone. Can I really know that? Well, no. You know, I really believe that his soul lives on and that maybe he's a sort of guardian angel in my life now, because he sure was a little angel for me in real life at the time. And then I was like, okay, well, is he fully gone? And what came up for me then was, no, he lives in my heart. He lives in, like, all those times I had these beautiful memories. He lives in all of the ways that he changed me as a person. He lives in all of these things that he taught me. One of the things that I felt like he really taught me at the end of his life was how to sit with somebody even more deeply in their pain. Because I don't like to see people in pain. I'll be honest. I don't. I really don't like it. And through working, you know, over the last 14 years or so with people, I sat with people on their pain. And I thought I was good at it. I thought I was good at it. But it was something else to sit with him in a cluster seizure when you can't do anything about it. It was something else to sit with him and wonder, is this the right. How much is he suffering? I can't know because he can't communicate to me. And learning that these sort of bouts of pain that he would go through were often passed. They often were sort of momentary, like a seizure would last for a little bit, and then eventually it would pass. And, gosh, that taught me how to sit more deeply and be present, even in deep discomfort that somebody else might be feeling. And I feel like when I say this, it sounds kind of cruel. I researched this. You're pretty much unconscious when you have a seizure. So he wasn't in suffering. So it was me who was feeling that more. And I learned to be able to sit in that and be fully present with him in those moments. And that was a very big deepening of. Of being able to be okay in that kind of, like, helplessness in those moments sometimes and sort of more surrendered. And so, anyways, I'm kind of down the rabbit hole here. I'm coming back. But the first part is questioning your stories. And so when I found, okay, he's gone forever. Well, is he gone forever? He's in my heart. He's in all these memories. He's in all these photos that I have Access to. I believe that his soul has passed on and gone somewhere else. Beautiful. And you know, he's in all of these ways that he shaped me as a person. And you know, he just had this like really happy go lucky attitude and, and things that I was like, okay, I want to stay connected to those things he brought into my life. So somebody is not gone. The form has just changed, right? They're not fully gone, they're just gone in their physical form. But there's all of this access to them in these other forms. And so that, you know, really helped me to come out of the. That story. And so now I had really done these first two pieces of processing and I, I would honor if other stories came up. But that was the only one I really found that was like a story. And I can't express how important it is that if you are like, I should have done things differently, something's my fault, I shouldn't have said this thing to them five years ago. Like, I, that's where I would see people struggle the most with grief. And truly you can't properly get through the next pillars of processing unless, unless you put those stories on paper and really challenge them, really work through them, really question them. And some good prompts you can use to look at this is, could there be another truth to this? Could there be more to this story? You can think of it that way. So this is literally, do we fully lose somebody? Was my way of questioning it, right? Because I'm like, he's fully gone. Hold on. Like, do we fully lose somebody? Is he really gone? Can there be more to that story? And it was like, well, here's where he does exist in these, these non physical ways for me. And that was very healing and, and I encourage you to do that too. But if you were saying something different, you would question that story. If you're like, oh, it's all my fault, which I've seen people like, you know, in very difficult situations have those narratives and it's like, well, hold on a second here. Like, there's so much more to the story. And so is there another truth here or could it be something other than this? How are you. Something other than this is a really important prompt. So if you're like, oh, I am bad because before they passed away, I said this thing to them that I shouldn't have and they took it to heart like, well, can you really know that that makes you a bad person? Maybe you're a human who had a human moment and you know, you then beating Yourself up for that isn't helping the situation, right? It's, it's chaining you, it's binding you to the grief. And there's a lot of stories like that that I see people carry after grief, especially in like human to human relationships because oftentimes those relationships are imperfect. Sometimes people don't talk to a family member before they pass for a while and things like that. And so you have to take the time to release yourself from those stories. And again you ask yourself, can I really know that this is the only truth? Is there another truth? Or could there be more to this story other than this story that I'm telling myself? And you know, am I something other than this story that I'm telling myself? Am I the only one at fault? Is it possible that there's innocence that I have here, here? Am I not good enough because I did something? Is it possible that I was good enough in this relationship in certain ways and where I did really try? And as you really start to look through those things, you will peel back those layers of grief. Okay, so we start with somatic processing and being and feeling our emotions and we stay attuned to ourselves so that when we feel that sense of heaviness or sadness in our body, we make room to be in it for a little bit. And as you do that, you'll start to feel like there's some relief from doing that. That. And the second thing is you air all of your narratives, all of those painful narratives, put them on paper and then question them. I have a free gift for you that we're doing just for a limited time. It is a course all about nervous system regulation and somatic processing of emotions. It will help you feel secure, safe and connected to yourself. It's one of our six major pillars of healing your attachment style. And it's literally for free. With our seven day free trial, access to the personal development school. And you can check it out down below. That brings me to pillar number three. When we lose somebody. I mentioned this earlier in this video. We, we don't. We're not hurting the most over their physical body, not being next to us or close to us, right? If their physical body and it's like kind of a. I apologize for the morbidity of the example. But you're not missing just their physical body, right? You're missing all of the non physical things, all of the, the things about, you know, what they brought into your life and the needs that they met and the traits they brought out in you and who to be when you were around them. And what happens is because our mind likes to attach, we attach to these things subconsciously without recognizing. And so this is where I figured it would be really helpful for me to share my own examples. But one of the first examples for me was that, you know, I attached so much. You know, the needs that Simba met in my life were that he was so joyful, and he would always make me laugh like my husband. I would just laugh all the time at all the cute things he would do. So there was. There was this sense of humor that he brought into my life. He met the need of being so joyful and spreading that love and joy. I felt so deeply, unconditionally loved by him. And he definitely met a need for cuddling. I'm a very physically affectionate person. And he would always get in the bed and cozy up into your arm or behind the crevice of your knee and get in there and cuddle up. And so these are just a few needs. But just off the top of my head, these were some of the big ones that came to mind. And I wrote out a bunch in here. But I'll spare you from going through all of these details. But, you know, so you write out these needs, right? What are these big things that you felt were met in this relationship to this person? And when we lose that person, those needs go with that person, right? Or that animal or pet. And so you feel like there's this disconnect and that void that's left behind from where your subconscious mind had attached to getting those needs met in those forms or in that form of the person or the pet or animal, when that goes, there's a void left behind because our mind hasn't yet adapted to new ways to get those needs met. And part of when you hear people say, like, time heals all wounds, time actually doesn't heal wounds. And I know this because I've worked with many people firsthand who lots of time has passed, and they still carry certain wounds. What actually happens is time helps to heal. Helps to heal wounds. It's not time itself. It's that our mind is naturally adaptive. So our mind, in time, naturally will adapt to getting its needs met in new ways. And so, in other words, your mind and time will start to fill up that void. And then we think it's time that healed. Time doesn't do anything. It's what we do in that time that matters. Okay, so, you know, so for me, because I know about grief, I'm able to say, okay, this sense of, like, humor and laughter. This sense of, like, unconditional love. The sense of affection and closeness and the sense of joy and the sense of presence, right? Like, the attunement that Simba had to my husband and I, like, those are the big things that I'm missing. So I sat down with my husband and we talked about this, and we were like, okay, what are we gonna do to, you know, honor him, honor Simba? But also know that, like, hey, we have a duty to also make grief easier for ourselves by filling up these voids in new ways. And so what we've done is we have this little ritual before bed where we, again, look through pictures. And as we do it, each time it gets a little lighter and a little easier. And we laugh more about stuff or we share an old memory or two before bed. So we feel like we have this sense of connection to him and his memory. And we have the humor and the laughter. Then we're making sure that we're extra affectionate and cuddled up. And we sit a lot more together and. And sit close to each other, and we have, like, that sort of affection. We're trying to stay super attuned to each other. And we're trying to bring in things that can help make that void less heavy. And we're watching funny videos together sometimes, like these little comedy television shows. There's this little television show called Impractical Jokers. And we'll watch little clips from it to laugh. And, you know, because we'd have these little moments throughout the day where Simba would make us laugh. And so we're doing these things that are, like us, getting those needs met in new forms. And a lot of them are still oriented because the grief is so fresh towards Simba, right? Towards his memory, towards pictures or memories that we talk about or share. But I know that over time, we'll try to orient that, like, you know, naturally to other things more and more in our lives so we can be present in what's in front of us. Right? And so. So that's a big piece. Okay, so what I'm saying here, and the reason I'm telling you all about my life in this way, is that I'm hoping that these give you real life examples for things. In human examples. Sometimes people make you feel validated or seen. Or sometimes they make you feel special or understood. Just to give you a sense of some of these things. Sometimes they make you feel the different needs that they'll meet. They make you feel like they accept you. They appreciate you, they acknowledge you. Sometimes they bring a sense of novelty into your life or passion or excitement or spontaneity. I've seen a lot of people grieve over breaks, ups or divorces when they were a more introverted person who did more things on their own time and they were with somebody who constantly broke them out of their shell. And sometimes, and that kind of more moves into our next piece. But sometimes those are things like that person brought that sense of spontaneity into your life or novelty or excitement. And so what you have to do here is write out the needs and then slowly, okay, this doesn't have to be all at once. And this definitely shouldn't be something where it's like systematic, where you're like, okay, nine o', clock, go do this thing. But if you can start to just slowly and gently move towards flexible rituals or habits that are going to bring more of those needs into your life, I want you to think of it as there's this big void left behind and you're slowly filling that void up a little bit more. And that's really going to help you to begin to process more effectively. And it's because like I mentioned, when we lose somebody, we're grieving so much more of the non physical than the physical. And the non physical exists in those needs that they met. That's a big part. Okay, so that's our third pillar. And you're gonna put little habits or little rituals to help yourself just fill up that void a little bit. It doesn't have to be this comparative thing where like you have to fill it as much as the person filled it and all these things, but just naturally moving in that direction in a slow and gentle way with yourself. Okay, pillar number four. This is probably one of the most sacred and most important, one of the hardest things about grief. And it's harder in particular if you are a parent who lost a child or a parent who, or a parent to a pet or pets. You know, these types of situations is you lose the part of yourself that you got to express that was so pure in relationship to your child or to your, your pet. And what I mean by this, and this is where most people get really stuck on grief and they stumble is because they don't recognize this. It's such a hidden form of where we experience grief. But you don't just miss what the person brought into your life, that they made you feel unconditionally loved, or that they made you feel cherished or important. You miss that you often while in relationship to them. Got to express the most sacred parts of yourself, in other words. And I'll share from my experience, and then you can sort of extrapolate this out onto yours and I'll tell you some other common ones. In other words, for me, you know, I got to be such a contributor. I got to be such a caretaker. Like, you know, I have needs for contribution. And to be honest, a lot of them are also met in work. And I think that that's made it a lot easier for me, is because I love teaching and sharing and helping people and feel like I get to, like, share and contribute. But I very much got to access that and taking care of my little dog who was sick. Like, I got to. To feel like I was somebody who was contributing and caring. And so much of. When we feel heartbroken by love, we think that we're so sad that we're not receiving love. When you love, you experience love. You experience feeling love in your body for someone else. And when you feel love in your body for someone else, especially, like, unconditional love, especially that, like nurturing love or caretaking love, love, that is a very pure feeling to experience as a human being. And it brings me back to that saying, grief is love. With nowhere to go, we often feel like, wait, we got to express all of this love? And now the person or pet that we would project that love onto has gone. What do I do with this love? Where did that love go? And I think it's so important to recognize and acknowledge that when we are in love or when we deeply love a family member or somebody close to us, we experience feeling that love in our own body first. And that is something we are grieving. That is something we feel like we've lost access to. And so for me, in my experience, I got to recognize that there is that. And I was like, I better be giving extra love to everybody around me. And funnily enough, that has actually really helped me. Like, being intentionally extra loving and expressive and vulnerable to people around me has helped so much because I feel like I'm. I was all of those things with Simba, and now having these outlets to express myself has really, again, helped to fill up that void, because that's the other part of the void that was left behind. And, you know, I felt like I was very nurturing. I got to nurture, I got to attune, I got to caretake, I got to do all these things. And, like, those are very sacred things that people experience. And I have done this work with People who have lost children, and that was always the hardest thing for them to get over, was that they didn't feel like they had an outlet to express this deep love, this deep protectiveness over somebody, this sacredness of loving so unconditionally and caring about somebody more than themselves. Right. And there is such a beauty to that. And that is part of why grief is so hard to process. So I want to ask you this. This is the way to find out when you were in relationship to this person or to this pet, who did you become? What traits did you express in your life? Were you a protector? Were you a caretaker? Were you a nurturer? Were you more attuned? Did you get to deeply express? Were you more expressive of your love, of your feelings? Did you feel vulnerable? Did you feel like you were deeply accepting or understanding? Did you feel like you learned through practicing patience or awareness with this person in this relationship? And those are usually the deepest things that we are very subconsciously grieving and don't consciously recognize, which is part of why it keeps us so stuck. And so being able to sit in that and be with that and notice that. And then I. We have to. If you want to grieve. And again, this isn't all at once. This can be across time. You can do these pillars sort of one at a time, but I want you to get the wheels spinning. Like, start thinking, who or what am I going to partake in in my life that's going to allow me to express more of this? And as I mentioned, my version of that was that I've spent more time with friends, with my husband, with family members, just being very expressive, very vulnerable, very loving, very nurturing. And that has allowed me to feel like I'm keeping this part of myself that I think I would have otherwise. Feel like I lost a bit of. With Simba, right? Because I was caretaking for him a lot. And that was such a big thing for my husband. My husband was like the most incredible. I was honestly blown away. He was just the most incredible caretaker and showed up so much with all of his medication he had to take and his routines. And we were doing that together, but he. I know that that's a big part of what he's grieving right now. And so. So that's a big part of the void. So not just what the person or relationship brought into your life, but also what that allowed you to have an outlet to express onto. And how we often feel like when we lose somebody, those parts of ourselves go with that person or in that situation. Okay, so that's a really important part. And make a list and start thinking of what activities. I remember I worked with somebody, and she lost a child in a very tragic way, and she ended up doing this work and then starting a charity to help children who. Who passed in a similar way. And it was so healing for her because she got to sit there and, like, and take all of that love that she had for her daughter and express it in this way to support other families and other children who may have gone through that and helped to be part of a solution to prevent or avoid it. And there was just. It was so healing for her because she got to take that love and express it in a really meaningful, significant way. And, of course, the form is not the same, but there's this old saying that, like, things don't. We don't ever actually lose or gain things. They're just forever changing forms. And I think when we understand that about life, and we move into that and we surrender to our awareness of that, and we move with the flow of that, and we're like, okay, well, what form can come for me next? Like, what form can I express this in next? How can I move into that? That. That allows us to flow with the current of life instead of against it by just numbing or avoiding or not acknowledging or not wanting to look at things. And so it's a very, again, sacred part of moving through this grief. Okay, so here's our fifth pillar. And in this fifth pillar, I'm gonna give you, like, a part A and a part B. Part A is that I really believe in finding healthy forms of connection without it dragging you too far into the past. Sometimes when we try to connect too much to something we lost, we put our consciousness into the past, right? We put our awareness into the past. We're constantly in the past. So I actually want to read this to you from A Course in Miracles. It says, unless the past is over in my mind, the real world in front of me escapes my sight, for I am looking nowhere, seeing what is not there. I think with grief, we have to have this really healthy balance, right? Like, you can go and you can think of the past and think of the past and think of the past, and you can get really invested in seeing the past and attaching to it. But when you do it too much, you stop yourself. You actually arrest the grief processing, natural evolution, because you're in the past and part of truly healing. And that's why this is the fifth pillar is, I think, finding a Healthy relationship. I've seen far too many people, and here's a really obvious analogy for those of you who follow this channel. I've seen far too many people break up with an ex and go and look at their pictures, look at their pictures on social media, or, you know, go through a divorce and reminisce about old times and reminisce about old times. And there's a time and place to do that, but if you do it too much, you're not present in your reality here and now, and you can't actually proceed to move forward with whatever life has for you in the next season. And so what I find here is really important is for us to create healthy rituals of connection to the person that we love and miss. But it has to be intentional as much as possible. Because if it's something that you constantly ruminate about, something that naturally happens at a subconscious level to all of us is our brain is a needs meeting machine. And if we can't get our needs met in the present, our brain instead breaks off, fractures off into trying to get its needs met through memories of the past or fantasies of the future. And that's where we get into, like, bargaining, like, oh, my gosh, well, if this happened, then this could have happened, and then I would still have this person in this way, and then this. None of that is helping you be present with what the reality is, right. What the reality is right here and now. And so we can get into fantasies of the future. Too much. Much. And this happens a lot in marital breakups where you fantasize so much about the, what if we get back together and what if this happens and what if they come back? And it's like you are hurting yourself when you spend too much time thinking about those things. Okay. Or we spend too much time ruminating about the past. And, you know, imagine that you're sitting at home every night looking through photos and you never go outside and you never make new friends or create new relationships. So we have to find a healthy way of staying connected to the person's memory and our experience of the person's memory without doing that in a way that prevents us from actually getting our needs met in new ways, being present in our own life. And so I think of this as finding healthy forms of sustained connection. It was the day after Simba passed away. I said, I'm scared that I'm going to forget the way he smelled or the way, like, you know, Simba would do this little thing where he would walk around the house and His. You could hear his little. Like, his little feet making this cute little noise. Or the way that you'd pet him and he'd make this kind of, like, funny face that he was all blissed out. And, you know, I said, I'm scared I'm gonna forget those things. And so what I did is I wrote them down. I wrote them all down. I put them on paper. My favorite things. We gathered all these photos and we put them together and we made this little space that, like, hey, if we want to feel connected to all these really beautiful things about him and his memories, we have a space for that. We have, like. And we keep adding sometimes to that list of, oh, remember he would do this. Remember he would do that. And it feels like we get to stay connected and have this space where we honor him and his memory fully without it being, oh, I'm scared I'm gonna forget this. So let me just keep thinking about it, thinking about it and feel, you know, this. This sadness. If I think I will forget about it, like, no, no, no. Just put it on paper, have it in a place. And then I have this. We have this time that we go and we connect to it or we add to the list, or we read little things or we laugh. And I know that in our process, because it's only been a few days in our process, as time goes on, we'll do that less and less, but there's this beautiful appreciation for, like, we have that list, we have those memories. We have all those little nuances of how he is and how he shows up, and that allows us to have this healthy, beautiful connection to a person's memory. I feel like I keep calling my dog a person because he felt like a person to your pet's memory. But you have this connection where it's not okay in the fantasy or in the constant rumination of the past. It's in a beautiful place that's on paper that you have this established relationship to. It's almost in this boundaried way. And that's not me saying that if I think about Simba, I'm gonna be like, oh, God, don't think about him. I can only think about him when I'm reading the list. Of course not. But there's this sense of certainty, which is a really big need off after grief for a lot of people that, oh, I have a place where I'm not going to forget these things, where I'm going to remember these things. And we gathered all these little videos and put them in a file and so having that established relationship to this has just been so helpful. So in summary, you know, I'm seven days in. He passed away last Tuesday. I'm recording this on a Tuesday and I'm doing okay. And there's still these sad moments and these waves, and I sit with them and I be with them. And I actually think it was, like, helpful for me even just to share and to make this video. And I'm being really patient with myself, really compassionate with myself, really gentle to myself. I'm taking time as I need to, to pause, to process, to feel. But I'm moving slowly through those five pillars. And it's not in this, like, super linear way. Like, I still have moments where I'm like, oh, I feel this feeling in mind, my body back to pillar one, do some somatic processing, or oh my gosh, I miss this thing. Let's pause and let's talk about memories or look at a photo or video. There's definite moving between the pillars, but I know those five pillars and I have some intentional support for myself in each of them. And it has allowed me so much to be okay in this experience. So the last thing I'll say is that I acknowledge that. That this is a hard thing for me. I acknowledge that there are much harder forms of grief for people to process. Tragic accidents, sudden losses, family members that you're very close to. I get it. This is not me saying that everybody's experience will be my experience. And if I'm being really honest, I had time to process in advance because I knew that my little buddy was sick for a long time and not doing well. So, you know, you see these themes and my only hope for you is that you can take all of this information and you can map it out for yourself and that you can have that gentle, supportive check in for each of those pillars and establishing a really healthy relationship to them so that as you grieve or you go through something, you have the opportunity to truly support yourself with it in a much more conscious and intentional and aware way that isn't just like numbing out or avoiding or saying time heals all wounds, when, like, that's not exactly what's happening. And that you also just have such a deeper understanding of grief and your process. So I hope my story and my little pup story maybe helped you in some way today. And I guess this video will be in loving memory of him. Thank you for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please, like, share. Subscribe to this channel and if you want to see more information or subscribe just anything like this. I'm here to support you, so let me know what you need and I'm happy to make content accordingly. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to subscribe, rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, share it with friends and family who are on their journey of personal development and growth, and thank you for listening. Next week we'll be back with more insights to guide you on your journey. And until then, keep practicing our tools and strategies to change your subconscious mind and apply some of the powerful learnings from this podcast so that you experience real life transformation.