Today I want to share how to ground yourself when you notice you are activated. But before we dive into that, maybe I should talk about what is activated, and how you know if you are activated.

Because honestly, when I think about when I first started experiencing these kinds of sensations in my body, I just thought I was going crazy and I was going to need to be checked into a mental hospital. The first time I experienced anxiety or even a panic attack, I thought I was going to die, and I kept telling my husband I don’t know what’s wrong with me and I think you might need to bring me in because I don’t know what's happening.

So, I’ll start with how do you know if you’re activated, and what does it mean?

So if I look up the definition of triggered or activated online, it says on dictionary.cambridge.org that triggered means “experiencing a strong emotional reaction of fear, shock, anger, or worry, especially because you are made to remember something bad that has happened in the past:”

Triggers can be anything and so personal to each of us depending on our experiences. Side note. I do not do trigger warnings on anything I post, because it’s impossible to know what everyone's trigger warnings are. Some could be triggered by certain words, some are triggered by certain pictures, events, ways of saying things, or sounds, it can be anything. So I cannot know what people's triggers are. 

Here are a few ways for me to describe Rapid Resolution therapy to you, so you can decide if it’s something you want to try in your grief and trauma, and also, right now inside of Grieving Moms Haven I’m doing free 1:1 sessions with the moms in there, it’s a win-win, they get free sessions, and I get to hone my skill and become better at what I’m learning and what I’m doing to assist in grief so if you want to join,

So with this therapy, almost everything inside of it is the opposite of what therapy, psychotherapy, grief culture, self-help, etc. whatever it is, it’s almost the opposite of how they teach or help others. And it’s mind-blowing to me. Maybe I resonate with it so much because almost everything I do in my life is against the norm, and I have thoughts and beliefs that are not normal or mainstream.

If pain is all you’ve known, or you’ve become so comfortable with pain what would it be like to not have any pain?

If it’s okay to not be okay, when is it okay to be okay? When you start to not be okay all the time, will there be a time you begin to let yourself be okay?

These are some of the questions that we are going through. We are too conscious or trapped in thinking that we will never be okay with our grief. Believing that you are already comfortable with the pain after child loss.

Join me and allow me to guide and help you overcome these beliefs and process your feelings to get rid of this pain and eventually accept that it’s okay to be okay.

In this episode, I am going to share with you some thoughts about journaling.

Here are the things I talked about: 

• My thoughts when people ask me, “what do you write about?”

• How writing helps you bring the unconscious to the conscious thinking.

• How huge a thing with writing, is when you keep your writing, you can go back through and see how much things have changed for you. Maybe even noticing how much suffering you’ve had in the past and how far you’ve come. 

• The 4 weeks of going through different practices of writing, as part of the Journaling Your Grief.

• In the first week, we will go through honoring and remembering your child.

• In the second week, we will be focusing on what is true for you right now.

• In the third week, we will be focusing on rewriting your story.

• And the fourth week, we will rewrite your story again with some compassion and love.

SIDS or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is the sudden and unexplained death of a baby younger than 1-year-old. In this episode, we get to talk with Jenna Rogers - Faith’s Lodge’s VP for Development - as she shares her story and experience with grief and having to lose his son at 11 months old during his nap. How she and her husband dealt with the pain and how she found meaning in helping other parents cope with their own grief through working with Faith’s Lodge. 

How Jenna grabbed an opportunity to work in Faith’s Lodge to share her passion for the organization and its vision for the community. Once started as a passion project and memorial for her son - Noah, to organize a fundraising golf tournament, and the proceeds were donated to Faith’s Lodge to help and serve more grieving parents. 

We have reached 200 podcast episodes! From being terrified in starting a podcast to being nervous to ask people to come listen, and NOW I’m two and a half years in and this is one of my favorite parts of my work I get to do.

Today is just kind of an encouragement day, to help remind you to be patient with your grief process. One of the biggest things I hear from grieving mothers is impatience that they don’t want to be feeling this way anymore. This is taking too long. This is too painful. It’s too much.

You do not have to be in a hurry to get rid of your grief, or to be better. Let them go. Your expectations of how your grief is supposed to look like is nothing but that, an expectation.

In today’s episode, I will share a few ways I’ve found that have helped me let people be wrong about me, let people judge me wrong, and let people misunderstand me. And I’m also telling you, it’s not easy. It’s given me a lot of anxiety over the years, but I’m learning to let go.