This week’s podcast is with world-renowned grief expert David Kessler. We talked to him about family, love, grief, betrayal and more. Here are the top five takeaways we have from this interview…
1. You can have Post-Traumatic Growth
We are all so aware of post-traumatic stress, but you can also have post-traumatic growth. You can have been through your darkest moments, have been floored and scarred and pained beyond belief, and yet you can still find yourself stronger on the other side.
2. On the other side of pain is meaning
You have to go through pain in order to move through it. You have to go through pain in order to grow from it. And you have to go through pain if you want to find meaning on the other side of it.
3. Finding meaning doesn’t require understanding
You don’t have to understand ‘why’ something happened, or why you had to go through what you did, in order to find meaning from the situation.
4. You can and should grieve the end of any form of a relationship
We know we have to grieve at the end someone’s physical life. But often we don’t realise we have to grieve the end of any relationship in any form. The end of a marriage, a job, a friendship, a partnership of any kind, is a death in its own way. The feelings of rejection that often accompany the end of these kinds of relationships can compound the pain. You have to grieve these ‘deaths’ in the same way you do a physical death.
5. Seeking closure really means seeking the end of your pain
We always want to find closure. David taught us that what we are really looking for isn’t ‘closure,’ but rather the end of our pain, and the reaching of peace.
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