Grief Unplugged‪®‬ Heather Horton

Hello and welcome to the first episode of the Grief Unplugged podcast. I am your host, Heather D. Horton.  Grief Unplugged is a podcast that frees professional women from the blockages of grief to find purpose in their pain.  I am so excited to welcome you to this community where you will receive education and support while navigating on your grief journey.  Community = Strength is what I truly believe. 
My mission is to empower professional women to unmask their pain, leverage their emotions and transform their trauma into triumph.  Each episode will help you give yourself permission to grieve and fully embrace the gift of now.  You will learn that grief not only encompasses death but includes so much more.  Anything that has a beginning and an end requires you to process the grief around it. 
This podcast is for you if you’re a professional woman whether you are just starting your career, mid-career, or in the C-suite who has experienced the loss of a loved one, whether suddenly or anticipated after an illness and you feel stuck and unable to move forward and enjoy work, home/family or your relationships. 
This podcast is for you if you’re a professional woman who is tired of feeling completely lost in life and stuck in your grief, unable to decipher your feelings or begin to accept the loss but everyone around you just wants you to bounce back and get over it. 
This podcast is for you if you’re a professional woman who wants a community to engage with that creates safe space to explore your emotions around grief/loss which are normal and natural by the way. 
This podcast is for you if you’re a professional woman who is ready to stop masking your pain, and focus less on the loss but are not sure how to embrace meaning and purpose in life again or for the first time.
I am Heather D. Horton.  I am a Certified Grief Expert not only through training as a Certified Grief Coach and a Certified Professional Diversity Coach but also through years of personal experience with trauma and grief. 
I will share more about my personal experience later in this episode.  But first, I want to tell you a little bit about myself.  Before August 5, 2017, I was a highly successful GS-15 attorney manager in the C-Suite of one of the most talked about agencies within the US Department of Treasury.  I was on the verge of walking into the next level of management - SES - Senior Executive Series after serving 18+ years. But I left it all behind to start my own location independent grief coaching and speaking practice. And I have never looked back. 
I am the co-author of an anthology entitled “The Roots of Holiday Grief: Transcending Loss During the Holidays and Beyond” which is available for purchase on my website - www.heatherdhorton.com. The anthology includes my inspiring personal story of loss, hope, healing, and gratitude as well as the stories of other resilient authors. I am also writing a book detailing my grief journey which will be available in Late Summer 2018.  Personally, I love attending sporting events, horseback riding, traveling the world, supporting the arts, zip-lining in NC and spa retreats.
This episode is Part 1 of a 2-part series detailing my own story of my personal grief journey.  Part 1 will focus on the accident/death that rerouted the trajectory of my life.  Part 2 will take you through my 13-year grief journey and how I was able to transform my trauma into triumph.
I now invite you to journey with me to the year 2005.  I experienced two unique tragedies that year that altered my existence.  I was 33 years old, so all this occurred during my Jesus Year -  Jesus lived as a man for 33 years on earth and then resurrected to heaven.   The 33rd year of life is regarded as the year you are reborn in some sense.  I wholeheartedly agree that I was reborn in a number of ways that year. 
On May 17, 2005, a beautiful sunny morning, my aunt and uncle (my mother’s brother), two of th

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 grief to find purpose in their pain.  This episode is Part 2 of a 2-part series detailing my own story of my grief journey.  Part 1 focused on the accident/death that rerouted the trajectory of my life.  Today, Part 2 will take you through my 13-year grief journey and how I was able to transform my trauma into triumph and shift from grief to gratitude.
While moving to Phoenix, AZ seemed ideal at the time.  What I didn’t realize was that I had to start my life all over again.  I had a support system in Louisiana, but now in AZ, it was just me.  Anything or situation that has a beginning and results in grief that must be processed, or it will chip away at your joy constantly.  Joy is something no one can take away from you, unlike happiness which can fluctuate on a whim.  While I had a job, I had no family in Phoenix.  I had to establish new friendships, find a new church, a new hair stylist, and learn my way around a city that was completely foreign to me. 
That was a lot for me to take on when I was already dealing with one of the most difficult situations in life, losing my mother suddenly in a tragic accident.  I had left the one place that I had known for more 30 years of my life.  I had lived there all but three years of my life at that time.  Were my silence and solitude worth moving all the way to the other side of the country away from everyone and everything that I was familiar with?  As daunting as it seemed, my answer to that question was a resounding yes, because challenges are what I lived for.  This was the opportunity to start my life anew, and I was going to chart my path, create my new “normal.”  I began to immerse myself in seeking therapeutic support after moving to Phoenix.  Time spent alone processing my grief only moved me forward so much. 
There were a number of ways that I sought therapeutic support over the last 13 years on my grief journey – I tried a number of things because I felt that life was too short and I never imagined the day I would live without my mother so I wanted to live and thrive every moment thereafter.  I engaged in physical therapy and massage therapy to recover from my injuries, seeing a psychologist/therapist, traveling the world, season tickets to sporting events, spa retreats, broadened my horizons by white water rafting, ziplining, feed my soul with Bible Study Fellowship International, using essential oils for physical and emotional support, leadership/empowerment/grief coaching, yoga and most recently The Dinner Party. 
I will briefly share my experiences with mental health support, essential oils and the Dinner Party in this episode. There is much stigma around seeking mental health assistance, therapy, and coaching, in this country and particularly among marginalized communities and communities of color.  When my mother passed away suddenly, it was like I lost my best friend.  I needed to talk to someone, or I thought I would burst.  I didn’t want to talk to anyone in my family because they were all still trying to process their grief in their way. It was in Phoenix that I first sought mental health assistance. 
I have to admit I was more open to seeing someone in Phoenix because I was new to the area and no one knew me there or what I’d been through.  I saw my therapist or psychologist biweekly for almost five years, or the entire time I was in Phoenix as she diagnosed me with PTSD as a result of the accident.  I thought I had worked through my grief and that I was done with it once I left Phoenix in 2010 and moved back to Washington, DC.  What I didn’t realize is that the last time I lived in DC (2004), I spent my final week in the city being a tourist with my mother.  When I came back to DC in 2010, I started to grieve all over again as if I had never seen the

Episode 002- [Grief Unplugged Podcast] - Give Yourself Permission to Grieve
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 grief to find purpose in their pain.  This episode is fundamental to your grief journey - giving yourself permission to grieve.  I will explore and unpack what is grief and the grieving process, identify the many faces of grief, and validate the uniqueness of your grief experience.
How do you keep going when you would rather stop waking up or crawl into a ball and never come out?  Give Yourself Permission to Grieve.  Grief is an inevitable part of life.  Remember that we live in a fallen world, where blessings and sorrows intermingle freely.  Grief knows no zip code.  It touches us all at some point in our lives in more ways than we realize or recognize.  It is unpredictable.  It is not mental illness or a sign of weakness. 
 
It is the normal and natural response to trauma and loss. It is an act of love and compassion to ourselves when you allow yourself to work through it.  Trauma, includes not only serious injury to the body, as a result of physical violence or an accident, but also experiences that causes severe anxiety or emotional distress or that causes great disruption or suffering in our lives.  Loss is similarly defined as the condition of being deprived or bereaved of something or someone.   Grief is like the trunk of tree, but it has many, many branches – they are endless. 
 
You may have recently experienced the loss of a loved one, be it a family member or friend, or years may have passed since the death occurred.  You may have just lost a job or been unemployed for some time.  You may be going through a divorce, just ended a relationship or need to end a relationship.  You may have now have an empty nest as you children/child went off to college or got married.  You may have a special needs child or be serving as the caregiver for a parent with dementia or cancer.
 
For any of you with children, do you remember your first-born’s reaction when the next sibling came along?  Maybe something caused you to lose sight of a dream you once held and you no longer can envision a way to get back there.  These are some of the many faces of grief – again, they are endless.  The most notable time where I had to give myself permission to grieve occurred after my mother and I were involved in a car accident 13 years ago.  I touch on that more in the first two episodes of my podcast that detail my story.  I suffered severe non-life threatening injuries but she succumbed to her injuries almost immediately. 
 
I will be even more transparent and tell you the latest thing that I had to give myself permission to grieve over – leaving my job to become an entrepreneur.  Although I knew that God had called me to help individuals navigate through the wilderness of grief, I had to adjust to no longer doing what I loved which was being a lawyer and working to create more diversity and inclusion to elevate others within my organization.  It was a great disruption to all of a sudden leave what I knew for the last 13+ years but I realized once I accepted that my feelings were normal and natural, I was able to see my greater purpose in being able to elevate others in a different way, a way that could save lives, empower communities and change the world.  I was able to give up the hope that things would have happened differently and focus on taking action to move forward and embrace my new normal.
 
I need you to give yourself permission to grieve.  Your family needs you to give yourself permission to grieve.  Your workplace needs you to give yourself permission to grieve.  Your community needs you to give yourself permission to grieve.  The world needs you to give yourself permission to grieve.  I say that because I truly believe that the mass sh

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 grief to find purpose in their pain. Our last episode focused on giving yourself permission to grieve.  But how does one maintain momentum after giving yourself permission to grieve? 
One of the first steps is by leaning into your faith and facing your fear.  Fear and faith cannot live in the same house.  One of the powerful principles that I received during my training with Coach Diversity Institute states – We receive only as much as our faith will allow (REPEAT).  Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see according to Hebrews 11:1 (NIV).  Whatever your faith, belief is a powerful tool. Faith in the process, even in yourself, is powerful and important.  For me, faith is everything; it is my foundation.  In 2005, my faith and what I believed in was tested to the utmost. 
On May 17, 2005, I was involved in a single-car accident that claimed the life of my mother one day after the accident and my aunt two weeks later when a relative fell asleep at the wheel while driving long distance.  My injuries were quite severe but not life-threatening – fractured neck, fractured thumb, cuts, bruises, and abrasions.  For weeks after the accident and the funeral, I kept asking God why am I here, why didn’t I die in the accident, how am I supposed to live without my mother, my best friend. 
One day I was reading my devotional as I did most days after the accident to try and make sense of things, and the scripture of the day gave me a reason to keep living.  It was John 16:33 – I have told you these things so that in me you may have peace.  In this world, you will have trouble.  But take heart! I have overcome the world.  I begin to recall other scriptures that I constantly used to ground myself throughout my life – No weapon formed against me shall prosper (Isaiah 54:17); I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me (Phil 4:13), God has not given me a spirit of fear, but of love, power and a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7); For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11);
All things work together for the good of them that love the Lord, that are called according to His purpose.  That last verse, Romans 8:28, was, in fact, the exact scripture that my mother’s pastor spoke from when delivering her eulogy.  What I began to realize as I focused on all of these verses was that the accident that I experienced was all God-orchestrated and that He had prepared me to go through if I was able to stand firm in my faith. 
I want you to think about the last time you experienced trauma/loss, and I guarantee you if you look back six months, one year, two years, there were clear instances of things that happened that you now realize, oh that’s why that happened.  God was preparing you for whatever you went through, or He prepared you for whatever you are going through or for whatever you are about to go through.  God prepared me for the trauma I experienced in May 2005 and even when I survived Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, three months later.  I had a lot of time to think while I recovered from my injuries. 
When I looked back on my life experiences six months, one year, two years before, I could see clear instances of things that happened where I could say I didn’t understand it then, but now I understand why that happened.  God was preparing me to live without my mother when after my unexpected surgery in 2004, my dad, not my mother, spent two weeks with me in DC helping me to recover.  That had never happened before.  Another God-orchestrated move occurred when I received a firm job offer in New Orleans when I was pursuing opportunities to work in DC after graduating from GULC with my LLM in Tax.  What I didn’t

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 th

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 my three prior episodes, I have provided you with a vast toolkit of resources to begin shifting you from grief to a place of gratitude when you are ready. You know that giving yourself permission to grieve is fundamental to moving forward. Next, I showed you how to stand firm in your faith and face your fears because you are not inadequate as Marianne Williamson describes in her poem but you are greater than you could ever imagine because of where you are right now. We talked about what therapeutic support means and how you have to be intentional about it to support you on this journey.  And lastly, you learned how to leverage your emotions, invite them to tea or your favorite non-alcoholic beverage and then escort them out the door and take back your power. 
Now, I want you to take the next step and start to transition from focusing on the death/loss you experienced to remembering and honoring the life of the person you loved or the thing or situation that no longer exists.  Think about and focus on the essence of who your loved one was or what that special thing or experience meant to you, the values the person or thing instilled in you, the accomplishments gained by having experiences with that person or thing, the lessons learned, gifts shared, memories treasured and the legacy the person or thing left with you. 
When you begin to think about showing gratitude to a life lived or a situation experienced without someone prompting you to do so, you are beginning to shift yourself from grief to gratitude.  Remember that the reason you grieve is because you loved that person, thing or situation.  They added value to your life and validated you.   Grief can also teach us something about life if we allow it to.  Repeat.  I believe that after listening to my prior episodes and really applying the principles I discussed in your life, you may now be more open to this revelation of honoring the loss.  So, I want to ask you a question - What can you use or what did you take from the experience you gained after having spent time with that dear deceased loved one or dealing with that specific situation? 
Honoring the story about your loved one or your experience is synonymous with opening up to grief.  When you are able to talk about it, healing occurs more successfully and rapidly.  I want you to think of a way to deposit the value that you received from your loved one or experience into someone else’s life to not only help them to move forward but also to help you move forward.  There is a quote from Thomas Campbell that says to live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.  Repeat.  If the memory that you cherished about the person or that thing still lives in your heart, that person still lives with you or there is still hope despite your situation.  After my mother passed away, my sister and I sold her house and divided all my mother’s remaining possessions amongst the two of us.  We had given away tons of clothes, home goods, furniture, etc. but kept the things that were most sentimental to us. 
Among the items I kept were my mother’s wedding gown and her wedding ring.  I moved at least four times after her death but I never managed to let go of much of anything each time I moved.  Normally when people move, they tend to declutter somewhat so that they can start afresh in the new space.  That was not me. I wanted to hold on to my mother’s things for as long as I could as a reminder of her and the memories we once shared.  Instead of decluttering, I just always rented an apartment home large enough to accommodate my things and her things that I took from my childhood home. And