Finding Purpose in Your Pain

Hello & welcome to the Grief Unplugged podcast. I am your host, Heather D. Horton.  Grief Unplugged is a podcast that frees professional women from the blockages of unresolved grief to find purpose in their pain so that they are able to embrace their new “normal” and sustain productivity at work and in life. 

In the second episode or part two of my story, I detailed how I sought therapeutic support while navigating through the wilderness of grief.  But I want to go back and explain what therapeutic support means because therapeutic support is vitally important to help you to continue to move towards a place of gratitude, or even to find purpose in your pain after you have begun to give yourself permission to grieve.  You have acknowledged that your all your feelings and emotions are normal and natural, that there is nothing wrong with you. 

You have begun to accept that you can’t change the past and are beginning to take action to live out this new normal but also realizing that this is a cyclical process and you have to prepare yourself for the next thing that is coming.  It is how life works.  So, therapeutic support, what does that mean?  The term therapeutic is an adjective meaning having a beneficial effect on the body and mind or producing a useful or favorable result or effect.  Support is defined as the act of helping someone by giving love, encouragement, etc. or something that holds a person or thing up and stops that person or thing from falling. 

When we seek therapeutic support, we allow others to hold us accountable, and we exercise good self-care – meaning we are aware and recognize the need to make time to care for and nurture our body, our mind, and our spirit.  Time spent alone processing your grief will move you forward only so much.  You must be intentional about taking action as grief never goes away.  But life continues.  Your reaction to your triggers and emotions are what change if/when you do the grief work.  People tend to label emotions around grief as “negative” hence the grief avoidance society in which we live.  

Those emotions include but are not limited to, fear, sadness, discouragement, jealousy, blame, revenge, worry, disappointment, frustration, anger, and guilt.  However, what makes any of these emotions inherently negative except perhaps the way make us feel physically?  May I submit for your consideration that there is no such thing as negative emotions. 

How would your life be different if you were able to move from just coping with your emotion to leveraging your emotion for growth?  A power principle that I gained from my Coach Diversity Institute training states Emotions show us the way.  They point us to our next level of growth.  What could you learn from your emotions if you fully embraced them and all of your unique life experiences?  What would be different for you if you were able to use your emotions as a springboard to reach that place of gratitude after experiencing grief? 

As a certified grief expert, I help clients process experiences that do not feel so great and help them find meaning and purpose in those events.  I help them to understand their anchor and find purpose in their pain.  Unresolved pain will continue to rear it’s ugly head until you deal with it.  It is like waste, it must come out of the body in some form or fashion.  Similarly, the pay we experience must come out of the body otherwise it is harming us.  If your trauma or grief experience were tailor-made just for you, what would the lesson be?  If your trauma or grief situation happened to make you great, what could you learn from it? 

I believe my trauma experience was tailor-made for me.  I survived my accident to make manifest the glory of God that is within me.  From childhood, I have always been a deep thinker.  I was smart, but I have also presented myself to the world as a closed book.  I remember the first time in middle school when I saw the statue of Le Penseur in my French textbook.  It portrayed how I saw myself perfectly – head down, hand under chin, sitting slightly bent forward deep in thought.  I was never one to share my thoughts openly unless I was forced to share.  Either I didn’t think my idea was smart enough to capture anyone’s attention or I didn’t think the receiver was worthy of hearing my breath. However, the day of my accident in 2005 was the beginning of my Awakening, my journey from Heather 1.0 to Heather 2.0. 

My training with Coach Diversity Institute took the shame I felt about my traumatic experiences and brought my voice to light.  Coach Diversity Institute placed the microphone in my hand to help me to begin to share my story with others and make a choice to live an abundant and purposeful life by leveraging my emotions to find my power or reclaim my power.  I was reminded that I already knew how to overcome any challenge that crossed my path.  It has taken me more than twelve years to get to this point despite my varied professional experiences over the past 18 years. 

My story of resilience in the face of adversity is rerouting the trajectory of individual lives, empowering communities from diverse backgrounds and ultimately changing the world.   When people, professional women, begin to release the pain, the guilt and the shame that they carry around with them daily, through the transformative power of coaching, professional women, particularly women of color and marginalized communities, can begin to dismantle injustice and create systemic change in our lives and in the world. 

When you find you are experiencing grief or any of the other emotions I described earlier that are associated with grief, I want you to use this exercise to shift your mindset from being powerless to being powerful. The shift can happen in an instant.  I want you to close your eyes and imagine that grief is a guest of yours in a beautiful setting, maybe a park or a garden.  Take a few deep cleansing breaths to center yourself. 

Imagine that you are having grief over for a cup of tea or your favorite non-alcoholic beverage.  What questions would you like to ask grief?  If you could name grief, what would call it?  I want you to gently engage grief by asking questions of it and take your time to listen for the answers.  You could ask questions like what is your intent?  How do you plan to hinder me today? What are you doing here?  What do you want from me?  What do you want me to learn from you? What are you offering me today?  What do you want me to know?  What do you want to show me about myself?   When you have all of the answers you need and the time comes for a visit to end, thank grief for stopping by and escort it out the door. 

When you open your eyes, I want you to take a moment to journal your insights so you can refer back to your journal as necessary when grief returns.  Know that you can always invite any emotion to tea and visit with them and escort that emotion out the door when you are done.      

Power is the ability to co-create the future by standing present in the moment connected by your purpose, vision, desires, and acting by trusting your creative impulses.  Standing in your power means not allowing the past, current reality, systems of oppression or anyone or anything else define who you are.  Power is being able to chart your way forward no matter what happens.  How will you activate your power going forward?

I want to thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you will join us for our next episode of the Grief Unplugged podcast.  I truly believe that community = strength.  So, if you want to engage further with our community, you can join our private FB group, Professional Women Transcending Grief or if you are interested in one-on-one support, email me at [email protected] to get more information about my 90-day intensive grief coaching program, Reclaiming Your Power.  

To stay engaged with the podcast or learn more about my products and services, access my website at www.heatherdhorton.com. Also, please subscribe to the podcast, so you know when the next episode is available and feel free to post a review, let me know what topics you want to hear discussed and share the podcast with your tribe.  Until next time, keep moving forward.