Reconciling Grief and Happiness with Emily Thiroux Threatt

How do you go about reconciling grief and happiness when dealing with loss? That’s exactly what we’re talking about today with guest Emily Thiroux Threatt. After her second husband died, she turned to writing to help deal with her grief. It was then she discovered she could use writing to help others deal with grief too. This journey led Emily to write her book “Living and Loving Your Way Through Grief: A Comprehensive Guide to Reclaiming and Cultivating Joy and Carrying on in the Face of Loss.” As a grief transformation expert, she helps others find what to focus on during times of grief, giving them concrete tools during their most difficult times. On this episode of the Live. Love. Engage. podcast: Why Emily felt called to write her book. What Emily found the most difficult in dealing with grief. The strategy she uses to bring grief and happiness together. The power of gratitude when expressing grief. What happened differently than Emily expected when she started grief work. The role forgiveness plays in grief. How someone who has suffered loss can begin the grieving process. How grief can lead you to lose sense of self (and what to do about it). What Emily offers within the Grief and Happiness Alliance. What Emily realized was missing when she began having grief conversations. How free programs minimize the perceived value of a program. Why saying “I’m sorry for your loss” isn’t typically helpful. Helpful strategies to approach others who are grieving. The people Emily has grieved in her own life and her personal experiences with loss. Why reaching out to people who are dealing with loss is so important. Connect with Emily Emily’s website: https://lovingandlivingyourwaythroughgrief.com/ TRANSCRIPT Quick Links: Join the Live. Love. Engage. Community Intuitive Business Coaching The Live. Love. Engage. Book Support the Podcast with BuyMeACoffee.com Enjoying what you're hearing on Live. Love. Engage.? Subscribe on Goodpods or your favorite podcast platform, and click here to leave a 5 STAR Review. You can also watch the conversation on YouTube. TRANSCRIPT You're listening to the live love engage podcast on today's show. We're going to be talking about how to reclaim and cultivate joy while dealing with loss. Stay tuned. I am Gloria grace Rand, founder of the love method and author of the number one, Amazon best seller live love engage - how to stop doubting yourself and start being yourself. In this podcast, we share practical advice from a spiritual perspective on how to live fully love, deeply and engage authentically. So you can create a life and business with more. Influence and income. Welcome to live. Love engage. Namaste and welcome. Welcome. I am so delighted to be joining you again today for another edition of live love engage, and I'm delighted to have our guest with us who's going to be talking about lots of different things here, but. Pretty much what, for those of you watching, but those are, you have YouTube. We'll be able to tell, our guest is Emily Thiroux Threatt. And, I'll just tell it through the rest of you listening at home. I'll tell you more about why I mentioned that in a second, but anyway, welcome Emily to live Love, engage. Thank you, Aloha. I'm really happy to be here. Well, we are happy to have you and yes. And the reason Emily said Aloha she's, I'm so jealous. She is coming to us all the way from Hawaii, from the great, uh, island of Maui and, uh, Yeah, let me tell you a little bit more about why I've got her on the show today. So she is the author of the book called loving and living your way through grief. And it is a comprehensive guide to reclaiming and cultivating joy. And carrying on in the face of loss and she, that book has been the winner of the book authority, best new grief book. And I've got the silver medal for the living now book awards. And she's also the founder of the grief and happiness Alliance and host of her own podcast called grief and happiness. And she has a lot of experience in the grieving process, learning to face love with love. Face life with love, optimism, and joy. And her mission is to comfort and support those dealing with grief and loss, focusing on happiness, which I know when you're in the throws of grief, it often seems like when am I ever going to be happy again? And I know, I may share a little bit about my experience with that because I definitely have felt that, but, I would love for you to tell our listeners and those watching on YouTube today as well. Why, why did you feel compelled to write this book? What prompted it? The writing of the book really came from me, dealing with the death of my second husband. I've had two husbands die and I never thought I'd be in that position in my life. You know, you, you, when you get married, you might say something like till death do your part, but you don't think that's really going to happen. I found myself going, okay, now what do I do? And I was kind of struggling with that. I've, I've taught writing for many years at the university in California, which I still do online. And that was good. And, and I loved to write, I've written a couple of college textbooks, so I thought, well, I should use writing since that's what I'm comfortable with and familiar with to help me. And deal with my loss. So I started writing lots of different things, writing journals, writing gratitude, lists, doing other things, finding things, and that writing that I thought, gee, I bet other people who are dealing with loss could benefit from learning how to use these writing techniques too. So I thought I'll teach. So, oh, I haven't lived on only that long. Didn't know that many people and didn't know anybody on knowing you had had someone die. So I thought, how am I going to do this? So I went on meetup and had a scheduled, a meeting at my house saying, if this is your situation, we're going to meet on this day at my house, come on over and we'll write. And they did. I was shocked. I had a nice size group and, uh, we actually stuck together right until the pandemic started. We met regularly and they loved it and we found that we were. I'm smiling a lot in the meetings. We have tears too, but we also were able to find happiness and what we were doing, and I loved what we were doing there. And in the meantime, a few months after Ron died, a very good friend of his just dropped dead on the mainland and his friend was much, much younger. We were family, friends lived a couple blocks apart from each other and. He called my husband, dad. That's that's how big their age difference was. And I thought I'll, his wife is not going to have a clue of what to think about or what's important or what she needs to do. Cause she wasn't at a point in her life where this was anything she would have anticipated. So I wrote her a long letter that said, I understand where you are right now. And through my experiences, I've discovered that these are the things that you need to pay attention to right now. And these are the things that you don't. And I was able to get it to her within a few hours actually, after he died. And she let me know later how valuable that was to her, because nobody told her things like that. Everybody come and say, I'm sorry for your loss, but nobody was giving her anything concrete or something. She could do something with her about. So I thought, wow, I, I should do more. Then there must be something else I could do. I decided that what was hard for me was the kind of loneliness of the first year of not having anybody that really related to what you were going through. And so I decided I would write her a note and mail it to her in the mail. So she gets something in the mailbox every week for the first. And after I decided to do that, I thought, well, I'd better. See if I've got 52 things that I can say. So I sat down and wrote a list of 52 different things that would carry on through that first year. And I thought, this is, this is really good. You know, I really liked what I was offering to her. And as a writer, I thought, and it's also. So I got a publisher and got a contract and wrote the book and it came out this last January. That's amazing. There's a lot there that that you talked about that I think is useful for someone going through grief now, now, correct me if I'm wrong. Cause it sounded like you were saying at the beginning though, in this meetup group you were actually writing. So that was what types of things were you writing about or is it just like writing about your feelings or what was different every time I've, I've always. Focused on positivity. So I, the one thing I didn't want was for everybody to just sit and cry through the whole meeting and then never come back. Right. So we needed to do something that would be a balance that could include that. And, and that positivity is what led me to found a grief and happiness. And a lot of times when I say those two words together, grief and happiness people go, oh yeah, right. But the more they're around what we do and, and who I am, the more they can buy into it. And the more they smile and that's real, really what I'm looking for is to help people be able to take a deep breath and smile. So we would do things. I like we learned the value of gratitude and different ways to express that, especially in writing. And that was so powerful. Everybody always w they they'd always start off with, I don't have anything to be grateful for my. Husband or my mom or my child or whoever my dog, whoever it was died. And so w that would give us an opportunity to talk about that a little bit and then write about it. And they were always surprised with the things that they found as they did that. And then they'd come back and go, you know, I've been doing that gratitude lists and it makes a big difference. ...