Listen Here:

Moving through grief and loss isn’t easy, that’s why Jenn Hepton does what she does. Through her work as a grief and loss coach, Jenn gives the gift of understanding. Every step of the way you’ll find her standing right by your side. From the depths of sorrow to new found hope, she understands the complexity of the grief process. She will guide you on your own soulful healing journey by helping you gain an understanding of where you are and the clarity you need to move forward in your new life.

Tools that have helped her navigate loss:

1. A Support Team: Space Holders, Type A’s, and Escape Artists [as mentioned in the podcast]
2. Journaling: Writing helps us to process our emotions
3. Non-Negotiables: Pick 3 non-negotiables you can do each day
4. Movement: dancing or walking is so important to help release stored up grief in our body
5. Rituals and Routines: Maybe it’s lighting a candle or taking a bath or creating a sacred space in your house to remember your loss
6. Remember not to be hard on yourself
7. Find a Grief therapist and/or Grief Coach
8. DO see your naturopath and/or doctor for a check-up on your autoimmune!!

Additional Resources:

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Episode Transcript:

Jenn:  The loss doesn’t define you. It’s what you choose to do with it that does.

Sarah:  Welcome to the Healing Uncensored podcast. My name is Sarah Small, and I’m a health and mindset coach for women with autoimmune disease just like you. I absolutely love helping you tap into your self-healing power to uncover the energetic side of healing and release limiting beliefs around your body and your life. Think of this podcast as everything you wouldn’t hear at your doctor’s office. It’s a place for empowered souls to move beyond food and heal themselves on a soul level. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Now let’s begin.

Hello tribe. Welcome to today’s episode. I just want to take a moment to just speak from my heart because the past week has been a hard one and I didn’t even look on my calendar to see that I was interviewing Jenn this Friday until the night before, and it really happened in perfect timing and we actually had a discussion after we pushed pause on the recording, pushed and just had a little bit of a chat afterwards and I was telling her that this past week has been hard.

Thursday was the third-year anniversary of my brother’s death, and there’s just never the right thing to do. This past three years, we’ve come to this date and I’ve thought, Oh, I need to do something special. I need to. Putting myself into all these shoulds or coulds, and this year I really did a lot of nothing. I was able to step away from work for the day and really just tune into my inner voice and my higher self and feel and rest. I really needed to rest, and then we had this conversation, Jenn and I, the next day. And it really was perfect and divine timing because we were able to talk about and really talk about, in this raw, vulnerable, candid way, what it is like to experience these emotions of grief, what that even means and how loss can really rock your world. It can make you fall apart, but it can also help you rebuild.

So I’m really excited for you all to listen to this conversation I had with Jenn today. She is a beautiful soul and also a grief and life coach. She holds not only the personal experience, but also this knowledge to help us navigate our grief and our loss. Not only in the loss of a loved one, and you’ll hear that today, but also the grief you may experience as you go through the changes, shifts in your life with autoimmune disease or chronic illness.

So let me introduce you to Jenn. Jenn is, as I mentioned, a grief and life coach, and she is able to hold space and support women as they navigate through the confusion of loss to help them heal, come back to their inner strength and wisdom, as they continue to get comfortable with their new normal. After losing her twins at 22 weeks six years ago, struggling with infertility and then losing her daughter at 39 weeks this past May, 2017. She also lives with Hashimoto’s, and at this point she took inventory of her life and she had to make a choice and she found her new purpose and started Loss In Transition, and this was to create a conscious healing space for those who are grieving after a loss. She is the proud founder of the nonprofit foundation that she has started with her husband in the name of her daughter, Marlo June Hepton Foundation, to raise money for cuddle cots in local hospitals for parents who have lost their precious babies. If Jenn is not coaching or writing or speaking about life after loss, you can find her teaching Zen yoga, hosting retreats events, surfing Instagram, walking her beagles, hiking with her husband and writing her book around infant loss. I know that regardless of whether you have experienced grief or loss in your life, you’re going to enjoy this episode today. So let’s dive in.

Jenn, welcome to the show.

Jenn:                  Hi Sarah. Thanks for having me.

Sarah:                I am so glad to have you on today. And we have known each other for a couple of years now and have quite a few things in common, but one of which is loss and it’s a timely week for me to be speaking about loss. I lost my brother three years ago yesterday, but I’m excited to have this conversation with you, even if it can be a challenging one, a difficult one. So I just wanted to start with a little bit of background on you. Can you share with the listeners some of your life path and some of the things that you have been through?

Jenn:                  Yeah, definitely. So I guess it all started when my husband and I lost our twins, which was about six years ago and it’s crazy how time flies, but we got naturally pregnant with twins, really excited, but you know, starting around week, I guess week 10, we found out that it was identical twins, high risk pregnancy. They shared the same placenta so it turned one of the happiest moments of our lives to one of the scariest moments of our lives. And then it was just doctor appointments after doctor appointments, and then we had to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy at week 22 because of so many reasons. So that was kind of my first … I mean, I’ve experienced loss through family members passing away, but they were my grandparents and my older uncles and aunts and everything, so that was something that is hard, but something that you were taught that it’s a normal progression of life.

Sarah:                Essentially, death is inevitable, but it’s different when it seems like a life is cut short too soon.

Jenn:                  Definitely. It’s like that out of order death that we experience out of order loss that we experience the really unexpected loss. And so when we had to make that devastating decision, we started to grieve. However, I found out I had an autoimmune disorder shortly after. I was getting really, really tired. Wasn’t sure if it was grief or not. Went to see the doctor. My mom was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at that time as well, and I was like, right, I need to figure out what’s going on and they said, you have Hashimoto’s. And I was like, okay, what does that mean? So here I am grieving the loss of our twins and finding out I have Hashimoto’s, and then I also developed a DVT blood clot from the pregnancy. So it went from grieving the loss of our twins to straight health concerns, stressing about my health, trying to get my health back on track.

That happened about six years ago. Within the six years, we tried to get pregnant again. And so it was that fertility journey, which is a loss in itself, then fertility and doing IVF and miscarriages. And then we did an IVF cycle with a donor eggs, and we eventually got pregnant with Loey last year. And as Sarah knows, I was ecstatic. I was nervous. I was excited. I was everything in between, and sadly we lost her at 39 weeks. I went into labor, rushed to the hospital, went to the hospital and they tried to find a heartbeat. Couldn’t find a heartbeat. I can remember that moment as well. The nurse checked and then the nurse asked for another nurse to come in and then that nurse asked for a doctor to come in. It was just a series of people coming in. I’m like, what is going on? Anyway, they told us that there wasn’t a heartbeat; that she had passed away. And so I went into straight mommy mode and survivor mode and warrior mode and realized I had to give birth to my daughter. And so I gave birth to Loey and we were able to spend a couple of days with her in the hospital, which was really amazing for our healing process. So we stayed there for about a couple of days and then went home without a baby, and that I think was one of the hardest experiences of my life. And then the grieving, the shock was kind of starting to wear off. Then I went into the grieving process and so that’s kind of the story, the backstory about how I’ve experienced loss in my life.

Sarah:                Yeah. I have a question for you. When I lost my brother, one of the first thoughts that went through my mind was this disbelief that I would never see him again. I was in Chicago. I had this eight hour drive back home, which was just like a living hell of course. There was a lot of traffic and I got back home and I found out that I was going to be able to see his body, and I was just overcome with the sense of relief, knowing that I would be able to see him one last time, even if he wasn’t breathing. To be able to go into that room and hold his hand and give him a hug, even though he couldn’t hug me back was actually extremely powerful in my healing process. I think that if I hadn’t been able to see him, it would have been a lot harder. So you said you were able to have a couple of days with her where you just kind of holding her, was that the beginning of you starting to grieve?

Jenn:                  It was, I mean, I was still in shock as you are when you find out, you know?

Sarah:                Yeah.

Jenn:                  And when you find out about the death and the loss, and that was a very, very important part of the grieving process for me, because with our twins, it was very clinical and so we didn’t get time to spend with them. I went into an operation, I came out of the operation and that was it. There was no time to see them ,no time to hold them. There was no keepsake. It was very, very kind of – sad to say – but matter of fact, and so when we were able to spend those three days with Loey and holding her and we were able to dress her and put a diaper on her and we slept with her, it was definitely very healing in so many levels because now we have that memory that we can hold on to. We had that closure which we didn’t have with our twins now that we were able to have with Loey. But I think most importantly, like you said about seeing your brother is that final goodbye, that moment where you’re like, you know I love you. I know you’re in my heart. I know you’re going to send me little messages. I know you’re here. I know your spirit’s here. You’re an angel. but in that kind of earth physical sense. It was a great time to just have closure and say goodbye. So that was very important in our healing process, most definitely.

Sarah:                Yeah. I remember feeling just so panicked thinking I wasn’t going to be able to see him and then getting that opportunity. It was still really, really hard in a different way, but it helped in a sense to just have that moment. Even just seeing his body, it was like he’s not there anymore. It’s just his physical being, but you could feel him in the room. So even though he wasn’t squeezing your hand back, it was like he was in the room with us. So I love to hear from you too, Jenn, how you think that the grief and the loss that you have experienced in your life, which has been great and heavy, how has that affected your health?

Jenn:                  I didn’t expect to have so much loss in my life, which is really interesting. When you lose someone that you love, there’s a period of reflection and you start to reflect on all the other losses that you have in your life. And so I was kind of in that place where I was like, Oh, okay. So I’ve lost babies, miscarriages, family members, but there’s also that grieving process loss of my health, and autoimmune is definitely … there’s a grieving process within the autoimmune when you have a chronic illness. So, in the beginning stages of our grief with Loey, it was that moment of just pure shock. It’s like you are a zombie in your own movie and people are amazing. They’re there for you, they’re supporting you in the beginning and then they slowly have to get on with their lives. And so you’re left there with your grief and your loss and you have to pick up the pieces and when you have an autoimmune disorder and you have to pick up the pieces, that’s a different – I shouldn’t say different, but it’s like an additional layer that we have to go through. And so in the beginning, to be honest, I just let my health go. You are physically and emotionally so exhausted that it is so hard to find the energy to take your supplements, to do what you need to do. Previously when you were trying to heal your autoimmune or live with your autoimmune.

So definitely the first couple of months I was just trying to survive. It was just basic survival instincts and I tried my best to make good decisions. So for instance, if I was going to breakfast, you know how we have to make sure we don’t have gluten and eat the right stuff, I didn’t have the energy to do that in my grief journey. So I was like, okay, Jenn, how can you make this easier for you? Smoothies? Oh my God. I mean, I had to make smoothies and I just put everything in a smoothie because first of all, you don’t have the brain capacity to even put anything together or do anything when you’re grieving, and then on top of that, you fight your autoimmune brain fog on top of that. So you’re just like, okay, I’ll just do smoothies and that’s what I did. I just lived off smoothies. Friends delivered food and we ordered out, and that’s what we did to try to survive that first couple of months. In the beginning, it’s hard to even think about your autoimmune. To be honest, thinking back to it, you know what you needed to do, you know what you need to do, but when there’s grief and you’re trying to kind of keep yourself above water, it was kind of pushed aside and it was compromised a little bit.

Sarah:                Yeah. I resonate a lot with how you called it survival. Survival mode to me is exactly how my body felt after losing my brother. I didn’t eat for three days. I had no appetite. I lost some weight cause I hadn’t eaten for three days, and everyone was like eat, Sarah, eat. Eat, eat, eat. You should be eating and I’m like, leave me the fuck alone. My body is doing what it needs to do right now, which is saying we don’t have fucking energy for digesting food. We are just trying to keep you safe and let you process. It’s like you’re digesting a whole different part. You’re digesting feelings and grief and you don’t have time to digest fricking food. And of course, eventually I started eating again because I love food, but at the time it was just like my body is in straight-up survival mode and this is where I’m going to focus my energy is feeling like the world is still a safe place because obviously the circumstances of my brother’s loss were very different – suicide – and it feels like the world is not a safe place because anyone could die any minute, and maybe you do relate to that even though circumstances are different. But we keep using this word, grief, grief, grief, loss. Let’s kind of break that down into some more digestible words for people. What the heck is grief? Maybe some people listening have lost a close family member or a child or a grandma or grandpa or friend, but some of them maybe haven’t, so let’s see if we can put grief into some more specific words. And Jenn, if you could just let us know, what does grief look like? What does grief feel like in your body? And it’s going to be different for everybody, right?

Jenn:                  It is. Grief has similarities regardless of how the loss has happened, but everyone grieves in a different way. Everyone has their unique grieving experience, and there’s always that talk of the five stages of grief and it’s not a linear fashion. It doesn’t work that way. It’s just a big shit storm. It is crazy ass shit storm. And so grief is I guess the feelings and the emotions that you feel. So you’re feeling angry, you’re feeling anxiety, you feel fear, you’re feeling sadness, you’ve feeling jealousy. Grief is that emotional state that you’re experiencing because you have lost somebody and it’s not even losing someone. It’s the loss of expectation and so we move into loss. Loss is loss – loss of health, loss of a person, loss of a job. It’s where expectations are not being met so you’re losing that. There’s so many different types of losses that we can experience, and we actually experience loss every day of our lives in little forms and we grieve also. But I think my intention being a grief educator and grief coach is to bring that awareness around grief and loss and take the shame away from it. Take the uncomfortableness away from it so that we can create a collective, a world, a society where we can talk about grief and talk about loss, you know? Hopefully that makes sense. Grief is that process, the grieving process.

Sarah:                It’s definitely not linear like you said. It’s a roller coaster ride. It’s being hit with this feeling in your gut or these tears in your eyes literally anywhere for no particular reason, except for that it’s there. It just comes up; it sneaks up on you. That’s how I experience it like, oh, okay, this is happening right now and it’s almost like you lose a little bit of the control of your emotions, which actually can be a good thing sometimes. Just allowing ourselves to feel and to express ourselves. So let’s talk about loss in the context of chronic illness and autoimmune disease, which we both also struggle with. Not only have we lost loved ones, but also there’s this thing that has changed, had shifted our body. So have you ever worked with anyone or just in your own personal experience, who also has this feeling of loss from chronic illness, this loss of who they used to be and kind of adjusting to this new normal.

Jenn:                  New normal, yeah. I’ve got a few clients actually that I’m working with that have experienced loss with regard to their health. So autoimmune. and it’s definitely a grieving process and it’s interesting because when you kind of open that door to them or when you talk to them about their change or their loss and how you talk to them about it in a way of grieving, it’s like an aha moment. They are like, Oh! Oh yeah, I’m grieving who I used to be before my health has changed. Yes! And when we realize the loss or the grieving process, then we’re able to honor the grieving process and go, okay, this is what’s happening now and this is where I need to go in my new normal. It’s so funny. It’s so similar. It’s like the denial, the shock, the fear, the anxiety that builds up, and then you start to become more aware of, okay, this is my new normal. What do I do now? You have to redefine your life and a lot of women – cause I work with them – are like, what does my life mean now? What’s going to happen in my life?

Not everything has changed in your life. You’re still the same person; you’re just a redefined person. You’re just a different person. And so when we talk about the grieving process, as we move from pre-diagnosis to finding out oh, I do have an autoimmune disorder and all those emotions that go with it, and then you think I would say out of that fog state, out of that crazy maze into okay, this is my life now, I find it’s a lot to do about accepting and surrendering. It’s uncomfortable for people because people are told to get over their grief. People are told to get over things, and the same with when we find out we have our autoimmune, it’s like, okay, get all it, move on and you’re like, no. You kind of have to create a relationship with it.

If you push the grief away, if we push that loss away, it becomes harder and we hold it in our bones and our cells and our body. And so when we are able to honor that grieving process, create an awareness and a relationship with our grief and loss in terms of our autoimmune, then we create space to work with it and to live with it and that’s kind of how I see the grieving and loss. That’s what I do with my clients is help them work through that process.

Sarah:                We’ve talked about grief being this emotional thing where it can hit you anywhere, but also this physical thing like I described like this feeling of survival mode and my physical body being like, no, we don’t have energy to digest food. So I think it really encompasses your entire being in these different ways. So because it affects you in this emotional and physical way, what are some of the tools that someone who’s grieving can use to – I don’t even want to say overcome grief because I feel like it’s not something that should be pushed aside. It shouldn’t be something that we avoid or try to dampen. It’s something that we move through, something that we fully experience, but maybe some tools to help them go through that experience.

Jenn:                  I love that. I love that – moving through it. It’s very powerful, because you can’t fix grief. You’ve experienced a loss so you’re grieving that loss. You can’t fix grief. Grief is something that you’ll have for the rest of your life.

Sarah:                If someone had told me to get over it – I don’t think anyone ever did that – I probably would have gone off on them. It sounds probably strange to people who maybe haven’t experienced loss, but it’s like you want to experience grief because part of that grief is also remembering and honoring the person that you loved, and so you’re okay with the grief, but you also don’t want to be in it all the time. And so that’s where I think the tools you were about to tell us will come in handy to help people just ease a little bit of that pain.

Jenn:                  Totally. Totally. And you know, it does move from the jagged, zigzag shit storm to more of a round edge. I don’t know if you’ve heard this analogy, but it’s like you’re in this ocean of grief and either waves come and go and you’re bobbing along as fast as you can, and sometimes regardless if it’s 2 months, a year, 5 years, 6 years, 10 years, all of a sudden this massive wave comes or this tsunami comes and it could be a trigger out of nowhere. You’re grocery shopping and all of a sudden, for me I see a baby and I’m like, Oh my God. I start to cry but the day before I saw a baby and it was totally fine. So it’s kind of finding the tools and the strategies to be able to…almost like your life jacket when you’re in this ocean of grief, cause you’re right. The triggers can happen at any time.

So the tools that I’ve used for myself and the tools that I guide my clients and the people I work with are number one is the awareness. The awareness that you are grieving, the awareness of all the emotions that you are feeling and knowing that it’s okay to not be okay. A lot of people fight against the loss, against the grief and then that can create so much more loss. So definitely the awareness, and then once we become aware of our emotions around grief, for instance, my go-to emotion with grief was anger. I was angry at everybody and anything. I was always angry and so I had to kind of create space around that. I was aware of my anger. Where did this anger come from? Why am I always angry? And then starting to understand it a little bit more and go, okay, well, I’m angry because that mom has a baby. Where’s my anger coming from? Oh, my anger is coming from the fact that I love my daughter, that I’m not with my daughter.

When we’re able to create the space from the trigger to the emotion to the realization, that’s where the healing starts to really, really kind of happen and that’s a big thing. It seems hard, but I think it’s just like I said, the awareness of your emotion is really important and also understanding that it’s just emotions. And I know you talk about this too. We feel fear and anxiety and sadness, and it’s up to us what energy we put behind it, because it’s not a good emotion or a bad emotion. It’s just an emotion that we feel and that comes up a lot. People are like, why do I feel so guilty? I don’t want to feel guilty anymore. Why am I so angry? I don’t want to feel angry anymore. And I’m like, it’s okay to feel angry. Obviously, you’re angry. Something bad has happened to you, because grief can be really, really confusing.

So some practical tools and strategies that I use and of course grief is a process, and so once you start coming out of that fog and realizing that your life is different now, this is where it kind of takes place, that awareness of our emotions, but also the tangible tools. With grief or when you’re experiencing loss, there’s a lot of triggers in your day in your life, and it’s being aware of your triggers and understanding why you’re being triggered. It’s not a bad thing and it’s also being mindful as you’re being triggered. For instance, going into a coffee shop is really difficult for me when I lost Loey because it seemed like everyone was pregnant. It seemed like everyone had a newborn baby and I would go in and I feel angry. I’m like, why can I not have coffee in my favorite coffee shop? You know, it’s not their fault and I had to take a step back. You just become aware I’m okay. Do I choose to go into this coffee shop and have a coffee and deal with the moms or be there with the crying babies, or do I walk away and go to a different coffee shop? It’s that sense of awareness and mindfulness, and I just choose to go to another coffee shop. That’s fine. You know, grief is painful and loss is scary and you can choose. There’s choice. You don’t have to feel pain. You don’t have to suffer, so it’s just making choices when you get triggered.

Another one is my non-negotiables. So my non-negotiables during the day – cause every day is a different day when you’re grieving – my non negotiables for me is, and I usually pick three, but one is meditation. Even if it’s for 5 minutes, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, whatever I can do, I find a quiet place in my house and I just sit and I meditate. Yes, sometimes my mind races and sometimes it’s just about listening to my breath. There’s no expectation, no attachment to what meditation should be. But for me, just starting the day with that helps. It anchors me and in grounds in the end. My second nonnegotiable is basically the smoothie. Getting my nutrients was really important, especially with autoimmune, and my third is sleep and rest because grief brain and grief exhaustion is a huge thing. Grief can really, really, really exhaust you and it takes up so much room in your brain as well, and it’s because we’re on survivor mode. We eat, we shit, we pee, you sleep. You can only do those things and so your body is supporting you in that grief process. With the exhaustion, it’s your brain sending you cortisone, upping your cortisone levels so that you can fight and flight, so you can be prepared and that’s where the exhaustion comes in as well, so napping and sleeping whenever you need to is very, very important.

Just taking time. I couldn’t read books for the longest time so it was Audible, it was audio books, it was Netflix. So it was just creating space for myself as well. So I think for me, it was understanding that I have a choice when I get triggered. It’s understanding the fact that it’s okay not to be okay in situations. If I had to cry, I cried. My non-negotiables really helped me through the day, anchored me and sometimes I wasn’t able to do all three. Sometimes it was just two and that’s fine because every day is so different when you’re grieving, and that awareness and space. But also, the most important thing that I definitely want to share with everybody is being mindful in that moment. So I’m crying? What is it about this crying? What’s making me cry? Just being aware of what you need in that moment, because a lot of people are like, I don’t know how to self-care. I don’t know what self-care means, and really, it’s about being mindful and listening to your intuition in that moment. Maybe you need a nap. Maybe you need to go home from work a bit earlier. So yeah, for me, those were the kind of the tools and strategies and there’s a lot of other ones as well. Again, it depends on everyone’s journey and what works best for them.

Sarah:                Yeah, it’s a different process for all of us. I’m glad you brought up triggers too, and just being mindful of them, but also having a choice in them. I mean, I’m sure you’ve heard this. A lot of people will say this and I’m sure they don’t mean anything by it, but one of my triggers was when people would say, Oh, I’m just going to kill myself and they’re joking. It’s obviously extremely insensitive, but it’s been said around me from people who have no idea what I’ve gone through. And so that’s one of those choices where I was like, okay, they’re going to choose to have that in their vocabulary. That’s fine. I’m going to choose to not take it personally, and not let that anger or upset me. And instead just send them angels, hope that they choose to take that out of their vocabulary someday, and move on with my life because it was just obviously triggering for me because it seems so insensitive when you’ve actually experienced that.

Speaking of which, some of the people listening, I found that once I experienced loss of someone I love so dearly, that I was much more easily able to relate to even one of my very best friends who lost her father the year before and other people who have lost people since I lost my brother, to be able to relate to them, to comfort them, to realize that I love talking about my brother and I want to be asked about him. I want to have conversations about him. I want to remember him. You are not going to make me feel sad or uncomfortable by asking about him. I want to keep the memory of him alive, but people who maybe haven’t personally experienced loss, I think there’s a lot of discomfort that comes up around people who are grieving or sad or crying, and they don’t know what the hell to say. I can’t blame them because I think I was also that person at one time. And so, do you have any advice for people listening who maybe just want to be able to support and comfort their loved ones who have experienced grief or loss, whether that’s a loved one, a child or chronic illness?

Jenn:                  I love that. I love that question. yes, there is so much that you can do, but I think the most important thing is to hold space, and to hold space for that person that’s grieving and just to listen to what they’re wanting to say or express, without having to fix them, without giving them an anecdote, without saying, Oh, well, things are meant to happen this way. Just hold space, just ask them how they’re doing and allow them to talk. That is the most important thing for someone who is grieving is having that opportunity to talk about their emotions, talk about the person that they’ve lost. It’s huge. And just holding space, which people do find uncomfortable because they love that person. They want to help that person. They want to fix their pain and they want to fix the uncomfortableness, but just by listening to them and holding that space, that sacred space is so important. And also asking them, how are you today? Basically, just asking them how they’re doing, and also realizing that it’s okay to trigger them. It’s okay to say something like, Oh, do you miss your brother? Are you thinking about your brother? It’s okay to say that, and it’s okay for the person who is grieving to cry in front of you cause I think what happens with people is they don’t want to make the situation worse and they don’t want to see you cry and they don’t want you to be in pain or hurt, which is amazing.

However, it’s almost worse not to talk about the person that’s passed away or not to talk about the loss because fuck, your brother existed. Your brother had a life. Your brother is such a big part of you. Same with Loey. She is my daughter. Yes, we didn’t experience her first birthday or second birthday. Yes, I’m not seeing her go to school. We don’t have those memories, which is another loss on top of that, but fuck! She existed. She exists. I am a mother and I have a daughter and I have my twins. Let’s talk about that and if I start to cry, that’s okay. These tears are tears of love. Grief is another form of love, and so it’s just that I miss my little girl and I love her. And so yes, talking about the person that we’ve lost, asking how we’re doing, knowing you can’t fix our grief, but holding space is very important.

I always tell my clients and people I work with is look for your three essential friends, your support system. One is your friend that will hold space for you. Just talk. Another friend is your A-type personality friend who will run errands for you, walk your dog, do the things that you just don’t have the capability of doing, especially when you’re grieving and you have autoimmune. They make you gluten free cookies, that kind of stuff. And then you have your third friend or your third support system. That person that will take you out for a drink or that person that will go for a hike, or just give you that escape from your grief, because like you said in the beginning, grief is heavy and there’s a lot of heaviness around that and it’s exhausting to feel your grief 24/7, so if you can find someone that you can escape your grief for just a little bit, half an hour, that’s awesome too. So it’s like those three kinds of support systems that really helped.

Sarah:                I love that. I think that’s so important to have that sense of community and support and tribe in your life with grief, with chronic illness, with autoimmune disease, all these things. It’s so crazy how related they are. You were talking about people asking you do you miss your brother? Are you sad today? And it also opens this doorway. It gives the person you’re asking permission to feel, permission to talk about this person, because I think even as the people who are grieving, it’s uncomfortable on both sides of the road. I don’t want to make people uncomfortable bringing up my brother. Well, if they ask you a question, it gives you permission to talk about it and that’s all you really want in the first place. But there are so many different intersections here between this loss of this loved one, this loss of ourselves in this illness that we grieve within us, and it can be addressed in so many similar ways. You talked about fixing, and when you’re experiencing grief, not wanting to be fixed. You just want to feel and express and move through those emotions. It’s the same thing with chronic illness. You don’t want to be fixed. This is still my body. I still love my body. I just want to feel better. Taking away that kind of verbiage of fixing ourselves and instead holding space the way you would for someone who’s grieving, the same way you would with someone who is experiencing chronic illness and having those three-pillar people like you just talked about. You also talked in your notes before this about the 1% better thought mindset. What does that mean to you? What is that all about?

Jenn:                  I love this. So when we’re experiencing loss at any time, it’s easy to fall into this victim mentality. Poor me, poor me. My life is shit. I laugh because I’ve been there, done that. And so when we start to move away from the depths of grief and into, okay, this is my new normal, and these thoughts of … it’s like the negative thoughts. I hate saying negative and positive, but that’s just me. When you have these heavy negative thoughts, what you can do is just do a 1% change so it’s a 1% feel good thought. So when you’re starting to feel really negative or there’s a story that keeps repeating, like for instance nothing goes right in my life. I’m got my autoimmune, my daughter’s dead, just nothing’s going right. This is where the awareness and the space come in. You’re like, whew, that seems like a really negative thought. How can I change this into more of an empowering thought? So just changing it to a grateful position. So it’s as easy and simple as saying, I have a roof over my head, I have water to drink, and once you start doing that just 1% switch, you’ll start to notice in your body this sense of lightness, this sense of kind of moving away from the victim, the negative, the heaviness into something that’s a little bit lighter because as you know, research and everything, when you start bringing in that gratitude and feeling of that, it changes you neurologically.

So what you’re doing is you’re changing your neurological pathways. You’re moving away from that specific pathway of poor-me victim, and just that 1% shift constantly, Repetitively into I have a roof over my head. I have my legs carry me. I have water to drink, very simple things. Then you start to create new pathways and these new pathways will start to become stronger and stronger and stronger. Then you’ll start realizing that when these negative thoughts come, it’s much easier to think of something different. So it’s like a good feeling thought, because when you’re grieving, sometimes when people are like, think positive. You’re like, fuck you. So I always like to say it as a good feeling thought, shifting it just slightly like that 1%.

Sarah:                Right. And then at 1% becomes 1% on top of yesterday’s 1%, which is then 2, 3 and then 4.

Jenn:                  Totally!

Sarah:                I love that you brought up the victim mindset as well, because again, I think that totally transcends between grief, loss, chronic illness. Like, why me? Why did my brother have to die? Why did I have to have celiac disease? Why do I have to have fibromyalgia? Poor me, my life’s over. Nothing’s ever going to happen good again. And we can giggle because we’ve moved past that, but we’ve had those thoughts before, and so I’d love to hear from you personally, just to give some of our listeners a little perspective. Maybe they’re still in that mindset. I get it. We get it. We hear you. We know what you’re going through.

Jenn:                  Totally.

Sarah:                Jenn, what are some of the things that – it sounds weird if you’re still in that mindset – but what are some of the good things that have come out of grief and loss for you?

Jenn:                  When we have something traumatic in our life, when something traumatic happens to us, we have the opportunity to kind of look at the pieces that have fallen and pick up whatever piece we feel resonates with us. And so within loss, within darkness, within shadow, there are definitely gifts that you can take from it. There’s definitely lessons that you can take from it. And I always say this, the loss doesn’t define you. It’s what you choose to do with it that does. And so you do have the choice. I know when you’re in the victim mentality, it is hard to see that you have any choices, but we create space and awareness. You’ll realize that you do have the choice. And so for me, I went from why me, why me? Why is this all happening? To be completely honest with you, I just was tired of it. I got to a point of pure exhaustion. I’m like, fuck, I have this life. I need to come back to my why? I need to find my purpose. And so when my daughter passed away, I was like, does she really want this for me? Does she really want me to be this victim for the rest of my life? No, of course she doesn’t. My why is to parent her on this side. My why is for her to be proud of me. My why is to help other people who are going through this to find their purpose and meaning. And so I think the why and the purpose took me out of that victim mentality, and I came to the realization that I had a choice. Fuck, it’s tiring being the victim. It’s tiring saying poor me. And then something just clicks. Something in you just is like, okay, how do I get out of it? It may be social media. It may be finding the support system that you need. It may be a word or something that someone says and you’re like shit, yes.

But for me, I just got to a point where I was exhausted and I was like, no, I have a life. This trauma, this loss has actually made me a better person because I can now really sympathize with other people who have lost and empathize with other people that felt loss. I’m just more mindful. Oh my God. I’m just so more mindful of things, and the small shit doesn’t bother me anymore. Like if someone’s worried about something small, I’m like, girl, you got to get it. When you’ve been broke into a million pieces, regardless of whether it’s grief, loss or your health, you have been given this opportunity to come back to your soul, to come back to your inner wisdom, to come back to your core being of who you are, and it is an amazing opportunity. There’s a lot of inner wisdom and inner strength that I did not know I have and now I do, and I’m pretty fucking happy about that.

Sarah:                Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I think it’s really amazing for listeners to hear that there can be this positive thing that then starts to grow out of what you thought or was the worst thing that has ever happened in your life. Absolutely was the worst thing. Well, there’s still this room for this little flower to blossom, to start to sprout and for you to gain wisdom, for us to see messages in our physical symptoms of chronic illness, or to really, really evaluate our life’s purpose after experiencing loss. And you could see two of us women talking right here have then made a career out of that inspiration, and you coach now on grief and loss and I coach on chronic illness and some of the energetic and spiritual and emotional principles that I don’t think I would have ever found if I hadn’t lost my brother. So I find deep, deep gratitude for that part of experiencing grief and loss, and I think we can challenge our listeners today to look at some of the things that seem like these horrible, horrible things in our lives and they’re still allowed to feel horrible, but where’s that little flower that comes up so that you aren’t stuck in victimhood for your entire life, because like you said, Jen, that sucks. It is exhausting. You burn out your adrenals and you feel worse and worse and worse. So where can you find that little flower in all of it? Thank you so much for joining me. We’re about out of time, but I just want you to share with all of our listeners where they can find you, how they can work with you in the future.

Jenn:                  It’s pretty amazing. I just wanted to say when I first was trying to get pregnant, I contacted Sarah to help me through that, and it’s really cool that now we’re doing this podcast I’m very honored. You can find me on my website, which is www.lossintransition.com. I’m also on Instagram @Jenn.hepton and I also have an infant loss support community which is @loeys.hugs, and that’s my Instagram account.

Sarah:                Anything else you want to add, Jenn?

Jenn:                  No. The one thing is if you are experiencing loss and you have autoimmune, know that you do have that inner strength within you to find that light and to move through. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but we’ve made it this far. And so because we made it this far, you’ll make it even further.

Sarah:                Yeah, definitely. Wonderful words to end with. Thank you so much for joining me today, Jenn.

Jenn:                  Thanks for having me.

Sarah:                Thank you so much for listening today, tribe. Don’t forget to check out the show notes where you can find all of Jenn’s links and included are some of her freebies so go check that out. And if you have a minute today, I would really appreciate if you can go over to iTunes, click leave a review and let me know what you think about this Healing Uncensored podcast. I love creating these episodes for you and having real, raw, authentic conversations that are staying true to being uncensored and really opening up more dialogue around alternative methods to healing. Healing beyond food on that deep soul level. Thank you again for listening today and I’ll see you soon.

 

 

 

Connect with Jenn:

Jenn’s Website: lossintransition.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenn.hepton/
Infant loss community: https://www.instagram.com/loeys.hugs/
Loss in Transition ​FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/176812109793683/?ref=bookmarks
Private group for Pregnancy Loss:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/120518611878027/

Connect with Sarah:

Instagram | Facebook Community | Pinterest | YouTube

Work with Sarah:

Online courses | 1:1 coaching | Send show requests to sarah@theuncensoredempath.com!