growth is sometimes very quiet and it happens in these very little moments.
And I think that's what's so special and amazing about every unique individual grieving person.
It's just these small quiet moments of, "I'm okay. It's okay for me to feel this and it's okay for me to hold this grief for the rest of my life."
[Music]
Hi, I'm Grea Bowers and thank you so much for joining me today.
If you've been growing alongside me in my work for a while, welcome back.
If you are new to me and my work, hello.
My name is Shelby for Scythia. I am a grief coach, three-time author and the founder of Life after Loss Academy,
where I have helped dozens of grieving people stop feeling lost, stuck, broken, and alone, and start building lines that they genuinely love from the lives that Loss forced them to live.
This, of course, not only includes death-related losses, but also losses like divorce and breakup, major diagnosis, and every other loss that radically changes your life.
Here on the show, we believe that grief is not something to get over. It is something that we grow with and alongside, and that when we stop treating grief like a problem to be solved, and start treating it like an invitation to live more deeply,
we create meaningful lives that are rich with all the memories we carry, the struggles we faced, and the preciousness of what it is to be alive right here and right now.
Today on the show, I am so thrilled to be joined by Alex Mamadiyarov, who has written a book, "The Title is So Close to the Title of the Show," it is called "Growing Through Grief," and we have a wonderful conversation about what it is to reframe purpose, how to get back into the world when you really don't want to, and the actual "how," "how," of "Growing Through Grief." Here is Alex's formal bio.
Alex Mamadiyarov, LMHC, is a New York-based psychotherapist and writer forging new standards for the ways we grapple with grief. She works individually with people who are processing all types of grief, including the loss of loved ones to both death and astrangement, as well as those going through transitions, encountering challenges and relationships, experiencing anxiety, working through trauma, codependency, or seeking to develop a stronger relationship with themselves.
Alex holds a dual master's degree in counseling, psychology, and mental health counseling from Teachers College, Columbia University. Additionally, Alex has obtained training as a death duel of whom Ailoa Arthers going with Grace and of Life Training Program, and offers group therapy on a regular basis for those looking to process grief from the loss of a parent.
Here is our conversation together about "Growing Through Grief."
Alex, I am so excited to have you on "Greef Grower," because the title of your book is almost the name of the show.
"Growing Through Grief," I am so excited to introduce people to your work and everything that you write and believe about exactly how to grow through grief.
So tell us the lost story that brought you to grief work, and then tell us how it became a book.
Sure. Well, thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to chat with you.
Yeah, so, you know, growing through grief is something that I think I've been doing almost my whole life. If anything, I think I really grew up with grief.
So when I was eight years old, my dad was diagnosed with a soft jail cancer, and he died three months after his diagnosis.
So that completely changed my family's life, first really big loss in our family, and then about a year later, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.
So she had a very different journey. She was sick for five, six years. She wanted to remission at one point.
And then it was just me and my older sister, Brittany. My mom died when I was 14, about to turn 15. My sister became my guardian.
And, you know, it's something that, like I said, I grew up with, and I found that the growth really never ends.
It's something that, you know, I've had to kind of renegotiate and figure out where it fits in my life with every milestone as I get older.
And so, it's sort of been this unintended experiment, I think. Certainly not when I signed up for or asked for.
Yeah, to, you know, see how this works, but through that I really believe in our capacity to grow through grief.
And, you know, I wanted to make something that I could share with other people about both my own experience, but also my clinical experience as a therapist.
And, yeah, that's sort of the, that's a little bit of background on my story.
Yeah, and something I love in your workers of therapist, or at least what I've estimated of you from Instagram is that most of the people that you work with are people who are grieving.
Some sort of major loss on the show we talk about the 3D's death divorce and diagnosis of like some of our life's biggest grief events, but everything else that invokes some sort of sense of loss.
I was one person and now I have to be this person because loss took something away from me, whether or not someone actually died.
And I think this concept of growing through grief and the grief never ends is something that you just say on repeat over and over and over again through your work, presumably is a therapist, but definitely in your public spaces on Instagram.
And in this book and it's something that's so validating to hear because sadly we do still live in a move on and get over it.
Sort of society that just thinks like I can't believe you're still sad about that.
Or you think that's bad. I had to grieve uphill in the snow both ways and I still got over it. Like just just this sense of if you're still grieving you're not doing it right.
And so the more resources we can cram into the world of if you're still grieving that's actually you're doing it right is the most validating thing that can exist.
I'm going to pull the first chapter out of your book that I highlighted, which is actually if you can believe it or not from page 4.
Because I was like, oh, we need to talk about this on the show. And this points to one of the biggest questions. I think a lot of grievous have after a loss almost immediately after because you don't just deal with the immediate paperwork and the logistics and the memorial and things like that.
You also are just immediately flooded with existential purpose of what does this mean? What is it for? What is the purpose of all of this? And you write creating purpose after loss answers the question, what am I going to do now?
The loss doesn't serve a purpose we do. And that's one of my favorite lines that you ever wrote when my mother was dying my sister asked her how am I going to do this? How am I going to live without you?
She was only 25 years old and preparing to be my legal guardian. My mother told her that I would give her purpose.
My mother wasn't telling my sister that becoming my guardian was the reason she was dying that it was some grand lesson concocted by her illness.
Carrying for me was simply what my sister was going to do with this loss. And I just love this perspective shift of like the loss does not serve a purpose.
It's not everything happens for a reason. We are the ones that serve the purpose. And the purpose is often TBD yet to be determined. We do not know what that's going to be. So can you say more on purposes of theme finding your own purpose and loss, but also helping people who are grieving figure out what the hell purpose is.
After some sort of devastating loss.
Thank you for pulling that and for really getting me in that moment.
I think these are like really sticky words to bring up meaning purpose.
I think they can invoke a lot of emotion. And yeah, my intention was really to first of all validate that you're probably going to experience a sense of lost purpose.
And I'd like to reframe it that it's probably not that your purpose is lost, but that it's changing. And it's really hard to see how it's changing when you're in it.
Grief can be so transformative, but there's like a real fog after.
And so, you know, I think meaning and purpose kind of work together. I'm really, you know, it's something I notice is that people tend to want to answer the question of why, why did this happen.
It's a place we can get really stuck. And we may never really feel that we have an answer to it. Like there's no reason it happened. Just like you said, yeah, everything happens for a reason. I don't believe that.
It's not, you know, what, why did it happen? But what are we going to do with this going forward? What does this mean for our lives going forward?
So I think meaning and purpose kind of work together in a way to sort of answer what was all of this for, you know, and the way that I answered that for myself is going to be totally different from somebody else answers that.
Right. So for me, you know, I mentioned this in the book that what was this all for? My parents gave me such a sustaining love. It's something that I'm so grateful for.
And, you know, the loss of them has really deepened my motivation to share that love with other people. That's where I'm at with it today, right? And that could change and I could that will continue to evolve.
But I think the first part in terms of like giving people something to hold on to is just recognizing that it's okay to feel totally lost when it comes to meaning and purpose.
And just know that you are changing going through something hugely, hugely transformative that it's going to take time to really kind of like arrive at whatever that is for you.
Yeah, I hardcore support that and I also really appreciate and the book you've mentioned sort of, I don't know that you use this language, but I use this language.
I'm going to use it right now, but like experimenting with purpose. And yes, it's a thing that comes with time, but your purpose or purposes might evolve or kind of triangulate or or constellation.
That's the word I would like to use with that time. And in my online course, Life After Laws Academy, we talk about purpose and meaning last after we've done.
How do I feel secure in the world again? How do I release what can no longer be? How do I fold my loss into my life? How do I do grief with other people? And then we talk about what the hell does it all mean?
And something that we do as an exercise is treating sentences or stories of meaning and purpose like sample chocolates and a chocolate shop.
And everyone has different tastes when it comes to chocolate. And so there's people who say everything happens for a reason or it's all a part of life and there's some divine circumstance or fate that we're all under. And some people really like how that chocolate tastes.
And it's a very common chocolate that gets bought and sold and stores all over the world. And then there's other meanings of like, well, maybe this doesn't mean anything.
Maybe I'm the source of the meaning or maybe there is no meaning to anything whatsoever. And like, how does that taste to you as a meaning to try for this season or this moment? Or maybe this means that I got to go back to school or I got the money to buy a house after a loss.
Or maybe this means I was never meant to have children or maybe this means I'm just a failure and have no purpose to society or something like that. And so there's really bitter meanings and chocolates and things to assign to yourself.
And then there's really positive ones, but neither is necessarily bad or good. It's just like which ones are you consuming or believing or telling yourself in each season of life and this sense of the loss does not serve a purpose, but we are the ones that make something of the purpose.
We choose what that means. The loss is not choosing our purpose for us. God, that's just like, I loved it. I loved, I loved reading those words put together. Like that was really something I needed to see written down.
I want to transition into how do we grow through grief because that is at the crux of the work that both you and I do. And one of my favorite things that you wrote is just a single sentence. It is grief waves are supposed to happen.
So can you talk about the shame of I'm still being activated by grief six months a year, six years, 20 years into the future. And that means something bad or wrong about me.
And then turn it on its head for us. Why is that a good thing? Yeah, grief waves are supposed to happen. And I think that they happen forever. I think that we might find over time. And you know, it's not just time that does the work. It's us also. But you know, they may come like further and further apart.
They may be sometimes a little bit less intense. Sometimes we still have hugely intense waves. I think what changes is that, you know, the more that we're open to meeting them and being in them, we really build confidence in our ability to weather them.
I think it's so scary in the beginning when you start to have grief waves. This feeling of like, is this going to end? Like am I ever going to go back to feeling normal? Am I going to be in this wave, the storm forever?
And it's part of why I think people avoid going to therapy, doing coaching, like anything where they have to open it all up because there's this fear that if I take the lid off, I'm never going to be able to put it back on.
I'm never going to be able to just live my daily life. But it's not true. And the only way we can kind of refute that idea is by allowing them to wash over us.
But it's supposed to happen because the grief never really ends, right? Because the loss never ends. The loss is always in existence. So as long as that's true, right? And it's always true.
There's always going to be some grief. But it's actually a testament to how much you're actually probably back in your life in some ways.
I think that's the different way of looking at it too. It's kind of flipping it on its head is, "Oh, I actually haven't felt like this in a little while. What have I been doing? Where have I been?"
Yeah, I've been living. I've never thought of it that way of experiencing waves of grief or a sign that you've been doing other stuff in the meantime. Some of it mundane, like answering emails for work or something like that, going to grocery store, things like that.
But some of it could also be taking trips or celebrating yours or others milestones or working on a book or something like that. And then a grief-weight hits, it's like, "Oh, there was something that was different from the grief for a while."
Oh, my goodness. I've never had anybody phrase that like that. I really like that also. I love just sort of picturing you, Alex, as like a great re-framer of what grief is and what it's supposed to mean to us.
Because that, even 12 years out, my mom died December 26, 2013. So I'm on the 12-year anniversary this year. That would have been so stink and helpful to hear.
Like when I was in the first year or two of it, because I think I assumed like a lot of people do that because I kept feeling immobilized by grief or like knocked on my ass for hours or days.
That there would be no way that I could ever climb out of it. And something that you also talk about in the book is oftentimes the things that we have been forced to go through are evidence that we can do other hard things.
It's kind of like the cliche like, "We can do hard things, we can do them together." But you were like sometimes grieving people use the loss. Like I survived my dad's death.
I can absolutely present this thing at work. Or I remember, I think I've told this on grief grow before. If I haven't grief growers, here's a new one for you.
I served tables after my mom died here at a white tablecloth restaurant in Chicago. And this lady absolutely chewed me out because I forgot to bring a sauce that was supposed to go with the meals they hit the table in my brain. That's a petty thing to get upset about before my mother's death.
But after my mother's death, I had this sort of invincibility feeling of like, "My mom died, you can't hurt me." Like there's no way for me to feel worse than I already do.
It is a challenge I can totally overcome because I literally watched my mother die. Like you can't hurt me anymore. And so there's this kind of cool invincibility that comes along with grief sometimes.
That's like, "I survived that so I can survive this, but I survived that grief wave. I can survive this next one." Whenever it happens to come, it might be tomorrow, it might be three months from now. I have no idea. And that's a really cool framing of that.
Yeah, I think that's really true. I mentioned this in the book I draw from some research on post-traumatic growth. And one of the sort of pillars of that is this change in self-perception of being vulnerable yet stronger.
Like I can be so unfathomably hurt by life. And I can weather the storms. How interesting is that you can hold this softness and this edge?
Yeah, I just had this image flash into my brain of, I don't know what movies or media I'm sort of drawing on, but more like figures. But you see these figures and media that go into battle. And I trust...
This is going to sound so cliché. But I trust a warrior that has scars versus one that has just been working out in the gym.
It has not seen battle or war or anything yet. As I would trust them as a leader, I would trust them as a guide, I would trust them to be able to survive the next thing because look how many other things they have survived.
And so there's this sense of, yes, they've been vulnerable before, but they are now also strong as a result of it. And that's not to say that they're impossible to...
Like that nothing can hurt them, that they're invincible. I know I just talked about invincibility, but it's not to say that nothing can hurt them or that they may never die.
But there's this sense of, they've seen some shit, so they could probably see some more.
Exactly.
Whether it's by choice, I'm running into a battle that I willingly chose to endure. Or life is doling out some stuff that I've never saw coming, but I survived some other things.
So maybe I can survive this one too. And that's for the macro and the micro, the big life changing stuff, but also our everyday fears, our everyday anxieties, our everyday bracing for the impact of the next grief wave.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, I love that. I'm pulling up my book, "Greef Growers." Sometimes I have the blessing of being able to pre-read a book before it's on shelves, but the curse of that is that it's on a candle that's password protected.
Every time I read something, I have to go in and type the password again. I want to get into this is a part I told you before we got on the mic where I was like bristling at this section because this is something that I struggled with after my mom's death, after my best friend's death, after my cat, after every major loss that has happened in my life, I have struggled with this, and I've been mad at people who like try and poke me into doing stuff or getting back out there or keeping busy.
I think part of that is because one of the first things I got told after my mom's death, which I call the first and the worst, is you just need to stay busy.
And if you stay busy enough and distract yourself from the pain, then your grief will heal.
But the other side of the coin of that, or I think a lot of times what people are getting at, is that when you resume relationship with the world, you heal your grief in a way that sometimes even you can't see from the beginning.
You are re-engaging with the world and that is a kind of healing in grief. So this is from page 66, Alex writes,
"People who are grieving not only find it challenging to re-enter the terrain of life after loss, but also to stay engaged in it.
It's not necessarily a matter of going to work once and then feeling integrated back into the world, if only, hard to agree on that one.
We may show up where we need to be, play a part and stay withdrawn in other areas, not keeping connected with friends, for instance.
When too much time suspended in the in between, we may ruminate in the depths of despair and risks cementing thoughts like these as truths.
I'm never going to feel joy again. Things are hopeless. This is where I lived. Despair was my neighborhood for quite a while after my mom died.
We know from research that decreasing participation and living reduces access to experiences that would actually refute those beliefs.
Only by taking the risk of going out there can we access a reality in which joy and hope are still possible for us.
Being out in the world also serves another function, grief, integration.
When we withdraw from life, we prevent ourselves from having experiences that cause us to meet the painful reality of our loved ones absence.
This thorts the challenging but necessary task of integrating the loss into our new and emerging sense of self.
The more we avoid, the more we struggle with internal dissonance, finding ourselves stuck between our old life and the one that is surfacing.
Confronting the painful reality isn't about needlessly suffering.
It isn't about getting locked into a place of sadness from which we cannot escape.
It is about letting the pain surface enough that we can use it to find a way through.
And as I was reading this, I was so mad at you.
Because I was like, "How dare you tell me to get back out there?"
And that that could actually be helpful to me.
This is the grief equivalent to eat your vegetables.
I think in my brain is like, "You got to grow through grief, but this is kind of the uncomfortable or the unpleasant tasting part of it.
This is not a reframe. This is not a vulnerable but strong and I'm empowered.
It's like sometimes you really do have to put on your shoes and leave the house.
And not necessarily see other people but to engage in the world, to show yourself, to teach your brain, to teach your heart, to teach your spirit that you are growing through grief that you are capable of doing things.
So can you please speak to you?
To people like me who are like, "Why would I eat vegetables?"
"My personality died." Like, "Why would I force myself to go do that?"
In this sense of, you really do need to be in the world because that is a form of growing through grief.
Yeah, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I do think it is helpful.
Here is a distinction that I would make is, yes, I think we do need to be out in the world at some point.
That is not the same as staying busy and distracted. We don't have to stay distracted.
So I do talk about going back to work and kind of like creating accommodations for yourself, or asking for accommodations, knowing when you need to step out, you need to go to the break room.
I do think it is possible to get out in the world and still honor what you are going through at the same time.
And I do like the comparison to eating your vegetables.
I know you don't want to do it. No one does, but it is going to probably be good for you.
As long as you are not denying what is going on and completely distracting.
But it is true, like I mentioned, there is some research on this that we have this natural inclination to retreat.
And it is so understandable and I think most of us do that when we are grieving. It is soothing.
And I think it serves a purpose. I talk about survival mode in the book. We have to be there for a while.
At the same time, long term avoidance, isolation, disengagement. It is just not conducive to any sense of healing.
I think that has to happen in community, in connection with other people, trusted people.
Yeah. Can you give some concrete examples of like re-entering the world?
Of like maybe some really micro ways that someone who is like, "I really don't want to leave my house."
So I would do that. There are people out there. I could just leave it at that. There are people out there.
There could be a grief activator around every corner. Like what are some micro steps that somebody could take to be like,
"I want to re-enter the world or I've heard it is good for me." But I really don't want to. So how do you take like a baby step to do that?
Yeah, absolutely. So I like thinking about it as one, two, three things a day.
And it doesn't have to be consecutive days, but just starting out doing one thing. I mean, I'm talking really at the beginning.
Getting up out of bed. And maybe you change your clothes. Like really starting there. That can be hard.
So I don't have to leave the house to re-enter the world.
No. Okay. Not in the beginning. I think that there are so many, if we're talking baby steps, I really want to honor that.
Baby step would be like changing out of your pajamas. Maybe the next step is, you know, I talk about kind of moving from the bed to the couch,
being an active resilience, actually, that even just getting out of bed.
And then maybe next, do you check your mailbox? Like you just go outside, just to the mailbox.
And maybe you don't even go through the mail yourself. Maybe you designate somebody in your life to do that for you, sort through your junk mail.
Maybe another day that week you go for a walk in the neighborhood. Just a quick walk.
And I think if you really start from there, it becomes just a little bit less daunting.
So it does really begin before you go back to work.
And I also want to honor that it's not the reality for everyone that they can take much time off of work or school. There's also child care.
But if it's possible to start small, I think it matters.
That's beautiful. And that also, every word in my brain, because as an extremist and an extrovert, I'm like, I have to go out.
I have to be at the grocery store. We got to go them all. We got to go to the park. Like we need to be in a big place where there are great many people and a great many objects.
And that is considered getting out into the world or re-entering the world. And I think your framing of re-entering the world is simply being a part of what's already happening.
But with some consciousness or with some awareness that that is what's going on.
It's a shift from autopilot to I have made the decision to change out of these clothes or go to the mailbox or wave to a neighbor across the street.
Even if I'm not going to talk to them, I'm just going to wave.
And that's a really beautiful thing. And also in life after the law academy, we talk about if you want to make grief anniversaries or grief traditions or choices and grief more challenging to yourself, you ask yourself, how do I involve more time, more money, more energy, more people as an expenditure.
But if you want to go less, you do less time, less energy, less money, less people.
And those are still valid ways to show up in grief. It's just like, how do I take the image of, I need to be out of mall.
And it's going to be like, way down to be like, I can still re-enter life after a loss by sitting on my couch instead of the bed, opening a laptop and maybe shopping online for a while.
Or asking or texting a friend saying, remind me again, where you got those shoes.
And that's a reminder of there are other people in your life. You can meaningfully engage with them. You can do things as a result of that while grieving, which is a big deal.
Oh, I'm glad I asked you for that because yeah, my brain was like, how do I do all the things all at once?
And also call that re-entering. And I think a lot of grieving people do that of because the baseline is not nothing.
The baseline is what your old life was. Your baseline was going back to the office. Your baseline was getting groceries every Tuesday.
Your baseline was being on car pickup duty or field trip, shop or own duty or whatever the case would be. Your baseline was often what felt like a bigger life.
And so to say you need to be a part of the world again, you need to get back out there. You need to do things. A lot of grievous, like translate that too.
I need to be who I used to be. I need to do what I used to do. Not I need to move from the bed to the couch or change out of pajamas or go to the mailbox. That seems to be a small.
Like it's very normal to me when people like me sort of inflate getting back into the world again or and conflate it with being who I used to be and doing exactly what I used to do.
And somehow having no problem with that when what loss has handed us is you're going to have a lot of problems with that.
And the invitation to scale down and make simple is a really beautiful one I think that is offered by you here today, but also also in your book.
I want to get to I have no idea why I wrote this down. I wrote page 71, bam, please read it at the end of the episode. I don't know what that means.
But it's apparently my favorite thing that you wrote in your book and I I just loved it. So I'm going to find it right now. You write.
It's very simple. And I think grief grows. This is the thing you can take beyond this episode with you. If you take nothing else, although I do hope you will go and get Alex's book and then come back and listen to this episode again where we are talking about things that are happening in this book.
She writes we live we grieve we rest repeat. This is how we grow through grief. And this is the ultimate conversation I wanted to have with you because so so many people ask or say I have heard I need to grow through grief.
I've heard I grow through it and not over it. I grow alongside it or with it and not over it. I I don't know what that means though.
How what does that mean and literally in three steps with a repeat live grief rest repeat. You're like that's it. That's how you grow through grief. You have simplified it for us. So can you say more if you would like to say more on what it is to grow through grief and actually how that happens in real life.
Sure. Yeah, I do think that like I was saying earlier with this sort of like unintentional experiment that has been having a life with grief from the very almost the very beginning is that I do believe in everyone's capacity to grow through it.
And I think some of that is passive. I don't think it's always so much work. I do think it is a matter like you said and like you quoted you know living grieving resting repeating.
But there are some more tangible things people can do and that's what I try to offer in the book. So a lot of it is self reflection on what has been changed or how you have changed through the loss.
I think that's the difference between getting over a loss moving on from a loss. That's just a ratio. Right. We're just like erasing all the changes were racing the enormity of the loss.
Growing is looking at you know how much has changed for you. Honestly and it's really scary to do but I think again it's something we can kind of like scale down taken pieces. So I offer an exercise in the book that you know people can do they can print the
picture that could sort of draw it on their own. It's an outline of two bodies me before loss and the after loss and you can you know right or draw in and around the outlines of the bodies emotions traits behaviors values interests.
And notice what looks different notice also what looks the same like what parts of self have carried over remain stable. That can be really anchoring and grounding to notice but also what seems to have disappeared or what has shown up as totally new and then deciding what you want to do with those things.
And so it might be you know recognizing some of these changes noticing what you want to reclaim what you feel like you can or maybe need to release what you sort of want to rebuild and then choosing aligned actions.
And this is again really long term work this is not in the moment where all you can really do is go to the mailbox this is you know embracing new found values and interests maybe it's spending more time in your community than you used to maybe you want to get out and see the world and travel.
Maybe you want to do volunteer work you want to get involved with the helping profession you want to make the art you've always wanted to make really like leaning into what has changed for you and it's you know it's slow work it's long term.
You know I don't mean to create more work for people but it's really just about leaning into a life that feels aligned for the reality of who we are now where we are today and you know letting life still have meaning for us and being something that we can enjoy even alongside the grief.
I love that because it's sort of it's answering the question of how do I still have agency over the person that lost forced me to become there's a lot of as you put it at the very beginning of this conversation is there is a lot of this that I did not sign up for there's a lot of this that I never wanted to be there there are identities that I hold that I never wanted to be true.
And the question that you ask the many many questions the journaling exercises and in different sections of your book that you ask are how do I still hold agency or how do I still have choice or where do I still have power and and decision making ability with something that I for a lot of us never wanted to be real or true or or part of our story and I genuinely believe and we talk about this so much on this show that this is how we grow through grief.
We do not insist that everything be up into the right progress. We do not even measure ourselves that way anymore. We look at the hand that we have been dealt and are probably still being dealt over and over again we look at the things that are true even if we hate them we look at the vegetables and say alright if all I've been given as vegetables what do you make from that.
If all I've been given is is stuff that's broken or stuff that nobody else wanted or stuff that I didn't order what do I what can I or do I make from that and I think that's a really beautiful guiding question to ask ourselves in grief.
This is my last question for me it just popped into my head but what do you what do you hope happens with this book like if you had a dream scenario of a grieving person who picked up this book and read it what do you want them to ultimately take away from the experience of having this in their hands.
Hearing that question is reminding me of something that I really do believe and you know I think I think many other people have said this I'm not inventing anything totally new years that growth is sometimes very quiet and it happens in these very little moments.
And I hope that when people read this book they come away with much more self acceptance and how that will manifest for them I don't know and I think that's what's so special and amazing about you know every unique individual grieving person.
But I hope that that's what it is I hope that even if it doesn't look like you know everything I just listed of you need to go travel the world and now you need to make it your career you need to do all these different things it's just these small quiet moments of I'm okay it's okay for me to feel this and it's okay for me to hold this grief for the rest of my life.
I love that yeah permission to know that even when it looks like nothing is happening there's always some sort of growth that's happening in grief.
Amazing Alex thank you so much for being on the show today this has been so much fun I truly love your book everyone go out and get growing through grief and I'll put a link to that in the show notes absolutely and if you'd like to connect with Alex I will put a link to her website as well thank you so much for being here today.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you so very much for joining me and Alex today if you're looking for grief support beyond this show you can find free workshops blog articles and my signature what's your brief support style quiz at shall be for Sofia dot com slash links and if you'd like to get support for me for your unique blogs experience.
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