My friends, today we're going to talk about healing after heartache. This is a guide to dealing with tragedy, because one of the people in my life has recently experienced some tragedy, some scary circumstances. What I see today that is massively important, if you want to have a life filled with joy, is being able to handle the worst things that happen in life. And not only to handle them, but to allow them to transform you, to allow the tragedy, the grief, the sadness to fuel growth.
I'm going to talk a lot from personal experience here, and I'm going to answer lots of specific questions, things like: How do I differentiate between giving myself time to grieve and wallowing in my sadness? How can I start healing after a big loss or heartbreak? What are some coping strategies for managing intense feelings of grief? Are there any daily practices you can recommend to help with heartache? How long does it typically take to start feeling better? Any books or resources? I have tons of this that I'll share with you.
This life is filled with tragedy
First is understanding that this life is filled with tragedy. There are hundreds of thousands of people who die every day on this planet, and with 86,000 seconds in a day, that means every second somebody's dying somewhere. That's just part of this reality. That's how it works.
What we want to really avoid with tragedy and grief and loss is self-pity, feeling sorry for ourselves, asking, "Why does this happen?" To me, it happens because you love people. And to me, the biggest tragedy is to love no one, out of thinking that you can avoid tragedy by just not loving anyone and isolating. While, sure, the more people you love, the more tragedy you will encounter, as I do, at the same time, the more people you love, the easier it is to deal with tragedy and grief and loss when it comes.
Practicing grief in Alcoholics Anonymous
The main way I experience tragedy and loss and grief in my life now is going to Alcoholics Anonymous every day. I go to help people stay sober and recover from addictions, and it's brutal. I've seen so many people die in Alcoholics Anonymous. But just like anything else, practice will help you get better at it. Sometimes grief and tragedy are really hard to deal with because we just haven't practiced that much.
When my dad died almost ten years ago, it was very difficult. But I allowed that difficulty, that pain, to fuel growth in my life. That's what's called alchemy. Alchemy is when you turn lead into gold, or when you turn spiritual misery, suffering, sadness and disconnection into love and joy and compassion and understanding for others. That's what I do. That's what the goal is. The biggest thing that will help you deal with tragedy and loss is to see that in each tragedy or loss you're experiencing, there is a huge growth opportunity.
How my dad's death became one of the best things that ever happened to me
For this reason, my dad dying, and I was very close to my dad. My dad was like what you'd think of as a mom. My dad was the stay-at-home dad. He was there every day for me as a kid growing up. He was the person I loved the most in my life, along with my brother and my mother and then my wife. I had four people I really, really loved in my life. And my dad dying was 25% of that, which was brutal.
At the same time, my dad dying is one of the best things that's ever happened to me, because I could not continue to live the way I was living at the time. I was drinking alcohol, abusing alcohol, an alcoholic. I was overweight. I weighed 70 or 80 more pounds than I do now. I was not a very nice person, according to some of the people who love me and are closest to me. I was throwing my life away, wasting my life, causing tragedy on a small scale to everyone all the time.
When my dad died, it was so much grief and sadness and loss that it motivated me to see that either I was going to do worse, and doing worse was going to look really ugly, or I was going to change my life and go in a different direction and turn this loss into a growth opportunity. And that's what I did. I found all these new father figures in Alcoholics Anonymous. Men I would not have been drawn to if my dad was still alive. Men who filled the space that my dad dying left in my life. This is the kind of inner work I keep talking through with people in the Jerry Banfield Family, because turning a loss into growth is so much easier when you're not doing it alone.
Personal tragedy is also a chance to love new people
If you look at tragedy, especially things that happen to you personally, and I'll differentiate in a minute between personally experienced tragedy and what I'd call vicarious tragedy. If you handle the personal tragedies, where a loved one, a family member, a friend, a co-worker that you know and have a meaningful relationship with, if you can look at those as opportunities for growth and opportunities to love new people, then that makes the entire process of grieving and healing so much faster and so much easier.
In my experience, you can feel better within minutes of a tragic event happening. You do not have to go through prolonged suffering. In fact, I've come to believe it is a choice to endure prolonged suffering.
My mother's accident, and letting the first wave come
For example, a year and a half after my dad died, I got a call from my brother. My nuclear family growing up was my dad, my mother, my brother and me. I get a call from my brother saying that mom just fell off her horse, she's injured very badly, we don't know if she's going to live, she's being airlifted to the hospital. At the time, my daughter was in the baby carrier. I was helping her sleep and she was asleep. She was an infant at that point, only a few months old.
I remember, as soon as I hung up the phone with my brother, I was overwhelmed with sadness, grief and fear. I literally just, as safely as possible, collapsed onto the floor, and I laid on the floor and hugged my daughter and scream-cried for several minutes. My wife was sleeping, getting precious sleep, which was hard to come by when our daughter was a baby.
Then something in me rewired. Previously my mom had been okay; now my mind was rewired. It was like, well, I don't know if my mom's going to live or die, we'll find out, and this is how it is. From there, I did not suffer hardly at all after I experienced those initial feelings. What makes suffering get greatly dragged out is if we try to avoid that initial moment, that burst of pain and misery. I've set the intention that if it comes, and the more people you love, the more it is going to come, then I let that initial wave, the few minutes of intense pain, suffering, sadness and crying, happen. And then you can start feeling better immediately. In my experience, the brain is amazingly resilient when you let it feel and move forward. What drags out dealing with trauma is trying not to feel it.
I know that in childhood many of us had experiences where we were not allowed to just scream and cry and have our feelings. But now that you're a grown-up, you're probably in a situation where you can let your feelings out. So if you want to turn grief into growth, let the full volume of your feelings out as soon as possible.
Daily practices and supports that help move feelings
If you're struggling to do this, things that have helped me and people I know include yoga, getting a massage, seeing a hypnotherapist, and going to a grief support group. If you have an addiction, or somebody else in your life has an addiction, you can go to things like Alcoholics Anonymous, or Al-Anon for family members and friends of alcoholics. All of these can help get your feelings moving. It starts with setting an intention and saying, "Look, I just want to feel this grief, and move on." I've talked before about how I control my destiny with intention-setting, and that ties in directly here. If you set your intention that you want to just feel the feelings behind your grief and your tragedy, then that makes things go so much faster.
Two kinds of tragedy: personal and vicarious
It's important to differentiate among different types of tragedy. For the simplicity of this, I'll say there are two basic types. One is personally experienced tragedy. This is where a loved one, a friend, a family member, co-worker, associate, someone in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, someone you know and have some kind of relationship or connection with, has something happen to them. And it doesn't have to be death necessarily. Sometimes it can just be them moving or leaving. It can be them not liking you or breaking up with you. The hardest ones will often be death or disconnection. These are the personal tragedies, where you are personally connected.
The second kind, which people actually tend to experience more often, is what I'll call vicarious tragedy. Vicarious tragedy is where you don't know anybody involved in the tragedy. This can be things like war, and the media, from TV to social media, is generally filled with vicarious tragedy, where you have no personal connection to anyone involved but you are experiencing the tragedy vicariously.
Saying no to vicarious tragedy
What I find helps in my life is to avoid vicarious tragedy, and at the same time to be very aware of what other people are experiencing generally on this planet. Vicarious tragedy is in many cases voluntary tragedy. If you're scrolling social media and you see a post of some horrible thing that happened, you voluntarily exposed yourself to that. Vicarious tragedy is often largely useless, unnecessary suffering. This is especially true when you identify with some particular group, whether it's a particular country, or how a person looks, or what they were involved with. This is often suffering that is purely generated, that you've wanted to generate, by being on these various platforms. Things like watching the news, you're submitting yourself to all this vicarious tragedy.
Now, I'm not saying you should be completely unaware of what happens to people on this planet. You should be very aware that there are massive amounts of human suffering and tragedy happening constantly. Some of the things you see on the news that look so horrendous are things that, from your point of view, might be really crazy things that very rarely happen in your everyday life. But some people live in environments where this is every day for them. The news is filled with things like shootings and violence, and some people live in situations where they have violence like that every day, and you often never hear about these people.
You often are only shared things in vicarious tragedy that are intentionally shared to try and get you to take some kind of action, or just to feel bad, but often to take an action that is actually contrary to what's good for you and good for us collectively. Once you're aware of this, you'll often just say no to vicarious tragedy. I don't need to see all this specific, and especially repeated, kind of thing happening on the planet. I do not engage with these vicarious tragedies, because I know there are one out of nine people on the planet starving right now. Somebody, probably during the time I've been recording this, has just lost a loved one, a child, a parent. People starve, which is so ridiculous on a planet full of people who are overweight. In the U.S. we're seeing record levels of obesity. Meanwhile, one out of nine people on this planet are starving.
Stop being upset at the form tragedy comes in
Another thing that helps with tragedy and loss is to stop being upset at the form it comes in. Often people get so upset about certain kinds of violence and absolutely lose their mind over it, but they will have no compassion or feeling at all for someone who's just starved to death. To me, that's irrational. Starvation is completely preventable on a planet where we have enough food to feed everyone multiple times over. It's so ridiculous and absurd that people are starving all over. So if you want to experience vicarious tragedy, think about the big picture instead of getting sucked into these individual little stories with their little narratives. I realize violence is awful and tragic, but someone starving to death is awful and tragic also.
It helps to stop discriminating among how tragedy happens. I have a friend who was one of my best friends in college. He just died of cancer. Many people would have reacted much differently if he had died of some violent act, but dying of cancer is normal. We're very used to having people in our lives die of cancer, and people often don't have the same reaction as if something violent had happened to him. People would have been outraged and going crazy. But since it's cancer, it's like, "Well, what can you do?" There are things you can do about every different situation. There are ways we can help each other. To me, loss is loss.
I have two children. It doesn't matter if I lose them before I pass, and it doesn't really matter how it happens. The main things currently killing people's children at an early age are drug overdose, car accidents, and self-harm. These are huge tragedies that are often personally experienced, but they are not as much vicariously experienced. So what helps me is to lean into personal experiences of loving people, and loss, and to unplug from all this media-generated vicarious tragedy, while still learning about what's happening on the planet as a whole.
Keep your heart open
With tragedy, one thing we often do is close our hearts, because it hurts a lot. And it's closing our hearts that really causes the majority of the pain. Because in closing our heart, now we can't feel love from anywhere else. I was able to make it through my mother nearly dying because I kept my heart open. I had five or ten minutes where I experienced maximum pain and suffering, and then I kept my heart open and continued loving everybody else in our lives.
Every time a tragedy happens to someone, it's a good reminder to make sure my heart is open and I'm loving everybody else in my life. When you really have your heart open and you're loving everybody in your life, it's kind of natural that sometimes bad things are going to happen to some people.
Alcoholics Anonymous has given me great practice with this. I remember a guy named Mike. When I was in my first year or two sober, Mike was trying to get sober. He was telling us how grateful he was to be sober. The next day, Mike overdosed and died. I remember just sitting in a room thinking, how is this guy, who we were all hoping for and rooting for, who was raising his hand and sharing gratitude. He obviously was not sharing the truth. He was not telling us how much help he really needed and how close he was to relapsing. Seeing that, seeing other people do things like that, has helped me learn. If you can learn from other people's tragedies, you can very much morph grief into growth. I learned so much from my father dying, and from every person I've watched in Alcoholics Anonymous die.
Ty, my grand-sponsor
Sometimes it's been people dying sober of cancer, as was the case for my grand-sponsor. I had a grand-sponsor named Ty my first couple of years sober, and he was like a father to me, or a grandfather. He really fit in both categories. I poured my heart out to Ty. I learned so much with Ty. Ty helped me love myself. Ty had a brutal life filled with whatever kind of awful tragedy you'd want to imagine, and yet he was in his 70s, and he was able to love others and lift others up and share from the heart and live an open-hearted life full of love. I learned so much from him. When he died, I remember just watching movies in the dark that he'd recommended, crying and missing him. It was like losing my father all over again.
Yet that experience was so good for me, because I realized, look at the capacity I have to love people. I allowed this man to fill the space of being my father, and I loved him like my father, and he died, and now I know that who I really am is the space to love people. When anybody exits my life, it's a chance to let somebody new take that space.
Let someone new fill the space
Right now my life is very full. It is hard for me to make any new friends or to have anybody new in my life, because I have a wife who loves me and is here every day. I have two kids who love me and are here every day, and whom I love. My mother lives next door now, which is just a miracle, because when she had the accident she was in Mississippi and I'm in Florida. I have a brother I talk to each week, who I was very close with growing up, and we still have a great relationship. I have all these friends, people I love in AA and in my yoga classes. When people approach me now and want to be a friend, I don't have room, and I encourage them to try and connect with this other person who has more time for them. My life is full. For better or worse, somebody needs to leave or die for me to have room.
If you have room to love someone in your life, that is an opportunity, and when you consciously decide, "I'm going to let somebody fill that space," you and they get to reap the rewards. One thing people do that often keeps you locked in grief is you refuse to let somebody else fill that space. You confuse a specific person filling a space with simply the space itself, the space you can use to love anybody.
For example, when a partner passes, often people will refuse to get a new partner, and that makes it hard to turn that grief into growth. It makes it hard to have your life filled with love at the capacity you can handle, because now you've essentially crossed an X through that space and said, as a memorial to this person I loved, I'm never going to let anybody else fill it. I say, as long as I'm here, I have the capacity to love, and I will fill all of the space in my life with people to love. Anyone who exits, for any reason, somebody else can take their place. Otherwise, I'm only hurting myself by closing my heart to the maximum love I can have, and I'm depriving someone else of that same love. This is exactly why I've come to believe that relationships are the greatest form of wealth, and that loss clears the space for new love.
So one of the best daily practices I can recommend to deal with heartache is to open your heart and get out there and love other people. The smaller your life is, the bigger the tragedy can be. My mom's life had gotten pretty small when my dad died. My mom lived with my dad. He was one of the few people she saw every single day, and him dying was a massive loss to her. She's just now started filling that space by living next door to me, by having my wife and my kids as a regular part of her life, and having me as a bigger part of her life. But there's still this huge space, this capacity she has to love, that is unfilled in her life, and for that reason she continues to experience more grief and loss. It's the pain of not putting somebody else in that space to love.
Why I don't believe in stages of grief
I'm not a believer in stages of grief, because these are ideas other people have come up with. I personally am a believer in this: you open your heart and you love people, and yes, it can hurt when somebody leaves, but you can also celebrate that there's somebody new you can have fill that space too.
Someone watching shared that this was helpful, that they lost their mom last year. I'm glad it's helpful, because I've seen lots of people in my life recently who've just lost a parent or a loved one, and I'm here to say that it can be a very positive overall experience where you do character building. Character building is often something a lot of us try to avoid, but loss and tragedy are great character-building opportunities. By character building, I mean looking within and questioning, is this how you want to be, or would you like to change some things?
Books and resources: past lives and the bigger picture
Some of the books and resources that have been very helpful for me in understanding and processing grief have been books about past-life regressions. What really helps me with getting through grief and tragedy is understanding that there is much more than just this life as this particular body. I've read lots of books. I would start with Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss. It tells the story of a psychologist who did not believe in things like past lives at all, and ran into a patient who gave him incontrovertible evidence of their existence.
Once you get into moving beyond just life in this body, and getting to know the bigger picture of life, it makes things like loss so much easier. Once you expand your mind and get out of very limiting beliefs, like the belief that this life is all there is, that you're born here and then you die and you either go to heaven or hell and that's it, that's extremely limiting. I know, for myself, the truth of reincarnation and immortality, that I now presently have eternal life. This is the same theme I dug into when discussing Seth Speaks and the eternal validity of the soul, why I've come to believe we never really die. The books that really got me to go down that rabbit hole were books about past lives. This bigger-picture way of seeing life is a lot of what I share inside the Jerry Banfield Family as well.
Remembering when I chose to incarnate
I went to see a hypnotherapist where I did past-life regressions, and I remembered some of my own past lives. What was even more valuable is that I remembered the moment I chose to incarnate as Jerry Banfield in this life. I've written about remembering the day I was born and choosing my parents to incarnate. Once you remember that, now you have this felt sense of immortality. You know that your loved ones are always with you, connected directly by thought.
I've continued to have a relationship with my father directly, by mind-to-mind connection with him. You can look at it that what I'm interacting with is an echo or a shadow of who he was in life as my father. You can look at it that my astral body is interacting with his astral body. You can look at it however you want to. What it does for me, though, is I know that what I loved most about my father is completely within me.
The vision of my father's life
I remember one night when my daughter was about two or three years old, she was being a pain, and my wife had put her in her room. It really triggered me, remembering all the things my dad did, disciplining me, hitting me, putting me in my room for a month, spanking me, threatening me. I had this huge outrage come up, that how could you parent me like that? How could you treat me like that? Because even my wife just putting my daughter in her room for a few moments, and my daughter banging on the door, I felt like that was unreasonable, and what my dad did by comparison seemed really unreasonable.
And I had this thought in my mind that asked, "Would you like to understand?" As if my father was saying, would you like to understand how I acted that way? My response was, "Yes! Yes, I would love to understand how you parented me that way." Then the next thought after that was like my father saying, "I'll show you." I got this vision of his life that passed before my eyes: him being in Vietnam and seeing some of the worst tragedies you could imagine; him being back home and going through his own drug addiction, alcohol addiction, sex addiction, gambling addiction; him feeling huge amounts of shame and loneliness; him in childhood being spanked and disciplined much more roughly than I got from him; and then his dad's childhood, which was just brutal compared to my dad's.
Seeing all that in just a moment, I went from being angry and outraged at my dad to feeling really proud of him, like, wow, from where you came from, you did amazing raising me. Once you start to tune into things that are possible like that, you realize you never really lose your loved ones. That which you love most about your loved ones can't be lost, and is always available to you.
You never really lose your loved ones
I tell my kids this, that I am always with you in your heart. Whenever you think of me, I am there with you. A lot of the religious teachings teach the same thing. You hear Christians say Jesus is there whenever you need him. All of us are there whenever you need us. I think of Ty lots of times, even though Ty was only in my life a couple of years. I think of Ty along with my father.
Ironically, the more tragedy and loss I experience, the bigger my spiritual world keeps getting. When my dad died, I had such a small world of people I loved. Now that I've been going to Alcoholics Anonymous nine and a half years, so many people I've loved have died there. I have so many souls that I love who have passed. I feel like I'm in this net, like a blue soul net. Certain times it will actually activate, like when my son was being born. It's like I could see the net of all these souls who have loved me and helped me and have passed. I have the lists of names, Ty and Bill, Roger, Don, so many people I've loved who have helped me in AA, many of whom have died sober, and many others I've just loved who have moved away. It's really nice to see the capacity that each of us has to love.
Why pain gives us the chance to help each other
In periods when there's pain that's acute, because I don't like it, I don't like what's going on, the value of that is it gives us the opportunity to help each other. Let's picture a parallel universe, which is kind of more like true reality, but let's picture a world where there is no pain, there is no suffering, there is no loss. In that world, is there any reason or need to help each other? Isn't it tragedy and grief and suffering and pain and loss that really give us the motivation to connect with each other, and help each other, and be there for each other?
One way you can avoid being always afraid of the next loss coming is to fill your life with as much love and as many supportive relationships as you can stand. It's so much easier if you look at your life as a puzzle, and each person you love is a puzzle piece. If you've got the puzzle fully filled out and all the pieces are in place, and then if one or two pieces are lost, it's relatively easy to fill those pieces back in. What's difficult is when you've got a life where you barely love anybody, and then one person is gone, and now you just feel wrecked.
What I do every day is I open my heart and I'm loving as many people as I can, as deeply as I can, as often as I can. Then when one person or another moves or is lost, yes, I feel it still, but it also reminds me of the infinite capacity I have to love. It reminds me that that person leaving, whether they've moved away or died, means now somebody new is going to fill their place. I get excited, I get curious. My neighbor just moved away, and I love my neighbor. She was a great neighbor. At the same time, I'm excited to see who takes her place in that house.
Balancing grief with the demands of daily life
The last thing I'll discuss with grieving is, how can you balance the need to grieve with the demands of your daily life? Stay in the middle. Make sure you have a full daily life, and continue with your daily life. Grief and loss can be a great opportunity to question: what are you doing that you really love and care about in your life, and what are you doing that you don't really care about that much?
If you have a life, as I do, full of things I love and really care about, when grief comes along you won't need to change almost anything. I really care about doing this to help others, as I've been helped. I really care about helping people make better decisions with their crypto. I really care about the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, the yoga I go to, taking care of my body and being healthy with others, helping people get sober. I love all the time I spend with my wife, my kids, my mother, my family. When something happens, I've already gone through and questioned everything I'm doing. If you ever want to follow more of the everyday, mixed-bag stuff I make about all of this, it's in my Life playlist.
If you have a loss, it's a great time to take inventory of your life. When my dad died, it led to me tearing apart my life. It took a few months, and I was not very good at handling grief, but I tore my whole life apart. The things that needed to go, I got rid of them. I got rid of drinking. I got rid of drinking-based friends and activities. I ripped out all the things that didn't belong in my life anymore. So if you're dealing with grief and loss, it's a great time to see, what things do I do that I really care about, that I really love?
Sometimes that can be challenging. If you're going to a job you don't really like just to get paid, going to that job might feel unbearable after a loss. That might be an indication that if you had a job you really liked, you would want to go to it no matter what, and that job would help you feel better. That could be an opportunity to reconsider, and to think about, what kind of work would I love to do, no matter how I felt?
Grief is proof of your love
I hope this has been helpful for you, to make it through tragedy and grief and loss, and turn that grief into something positive that you can use to help other people. The last thing I'll mention is, I still miss my father. Occasionally something will come up and I'll just cry about how much I love my father. If you can remember that grief is an indication and proof of your love, then grief becomes special. Grief becomes, wow, look how much I love my father. And that love is present here now. It has not been lost.
Ultimately, the love I have for everybody in my life has not been affected by them dying or them leaving. The love I have for them is still here and remains untouched. And the beautiful thing is, you can know that about everybody in your life too. The love they have for you will not be altered, and may even be strengthened by your departure. Now, I always encourage you to strengthen it by being there in person, but the love my kids have for me will always be within them, whether I'm around or not.
I'm going to go to yoga now, and I'm going to spend a good part of the day with my mother, because the value of losing my father has helped me really appreciate and love the time I have with my mother in a way I did not appreciate before. So I'm grateful I've turned so much grief in my life into growth, and I know that you can do the same.