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I'm Darian Slayton Fleming and thank you for joining me on GET what YOU need and feel good about it. Do you find it difficult to ask for what you need? Do you frequently feel misunderstood? Do you have a problem or cause that you would like to learn to manage more effectively? What makes it so hard for us to tell each other how we feel and how do we speak up for ourselves so we get what we need and feel good about it? How do we do this respectfully so that we honor the needs and feelings of others? Together, we'll explore tips, strategies and resources that, when used mindfully and consistently, will improve our results and enrich our relationships. Hello and welcome back to GET what YOU need and FEEL GOOD about It. I'm Darian Slayton Fleming, your hostess. This episode is a little bit of a continuation from what we talked about in our April episode, because today we we are talking about grief and loss. And last month I announced that there was a hiatus in my episodes because I experienced the sudden and unexpected loss of my son due to a drug overdose. And in my process of beginning my healing journey, I reached out to the certified Happiness Trainer community and was told that there is such a thing as a grief and happiness alliance. When I work with clients who experience loss, I never think of using the words grief and happiness in the same sentence, and I was amazed and pleasantly surprised that it is possible to do that. That led me to investigating that resource and ending up in a support group for people who have experienced a loss or where we can explore healing. Today I'm joined by Emily Thoreau Threat and she is the CEO of the nonprofit the Grief and Happiness Alliance. Welcome Emily. Thank you for joining us.

Oh, thank you for the invitation. I'm happy to be here.

To begin with, Emily, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what led you to do this grief and happiness work?

Sure, I'd be happy to. I have had two husbands die and it's been quite a journey to go through all that. My most of my career was teaching writing at the university level and I wrote a couple of college textbooks while I was there. And when my second husband died, we had just moved to Maui, Hawaii two years before he died and I wasn't real familiar with the area, so I was kind of, kind of on my own a lot and trying to figure out what I was going to do now because I, I just wasn't sure what my purpose was anymore because I, I had retired from teaching writing and at the university and I just didn't know what to do. And I thought, well, I like to write. I love to write, actually. So I'm gonna just explore that idea by writing instead of just thinking about it. And as I did that, I kept finding things that I thought, boy, I wish somebody would have told me to write something like this when I was just starting to grieve. And I thought, well, I could do that. So it was during the pandemic, and I ended up having a. An online group where we would come together and I would give them a topic, and they'd write together, and then we would break into breakout rooms and share about what we wrote and talk about it and listen to each other, which is really important, is to have somebody listen to you. And then after that, we'd learn a happiness practice, and we do it every week, and it's on zoom, so anybody can come from any place, and there's no charge for that. When I was doing that, in addition to everything else, a few months after my husband died, a very good friend of his died on the mainland. And they had lived close to us, their. Their family, and our family were good family friends. And he wasn't sick. He just died on his way home from work one day. And it was a real shock. And they were a lot younger than my husband and I, and I was really worried about her because I. I knew at her age, she wouldn't have thought about, well, what would I do if my husband died and I wanted to support her in some way. If had I still been her neighbor, I would have been over to her house frequently and figuring out what she needed in person. But I didn't have that opportunity, and I wanted to do something to help support her. So I decided that I would write her something every week since we were an ocean apart from each other. And it's not always easy to just talk on the phone. So I thought, I'm going to write her something. So I thought, if I'm going to commit to writing for a whole year, I better figure out what I was going to say. So I sat down and made a list of 52 different things, and then a few more things, because I thought of other things, too. And I thought, this. This is going to be perfect. Just what I had in mind so that I could write her every week, have something to talk to her about, of things that I had experienced in my grief that could help her with ways that she might be able to do that, too. So I did. And when I looked at that list after I wrote it, I thought, this is an outline for a book. So I wrote the book, and that turned into two books and a set of cards. So I. I did a lot of writing on that, and it helped me a whole lot. And because I really was able to feel or explore my feelings, and I caused me to think of even more things to write about. So I really knuckled down on that group that I had put together to. For people to come and write together. And I decided to do a podcast, too. But when I was making that decision, I thought, I've been spending so much time writing and talking about grief, I'm not sure how long I would want to continue doing that, because it was. It was kind of heavy for that to be my main focus. And I wanted to figure out a way that would support me as well as support the people that I was helping. And I remembered after my first husband who died, I read a book called Happy for no Reason by Marcy Schaimoff, and it really helped me. And I just happened to see it sitting on the shelf, and I said, oh, happiness, that's what's missing. Because I know I'll grieve for the rest of my life, because I believe that you grieve as long as you still love the person. And I certainly loved both of my husbands very much. I. I didn't feel unmarried from either one of them just because they died. So I decided that I would not know the name of grief and happiness. And I started having people say, why would you say grief and happiness? Those two words don't go together. And I thought, well, yeah, they do. I know that my husbands would want me to be happy. They wouldn't want me to sit around and cry for the rest of my life. Of course I grieve them, but I don't have to always be crying and always be sad. That it's. It's important to have a balanced life and to be able to find what I can be happy about and what my purpose really is now that I've had these big, major changes in my life. So I did create the Happy for no Reason podcast, and it's been very successful. I've had over 300 episodes now and thousands of downloads, and I'm. I'm really enjoying it and meeting so many different people around the world, actually, that have found different ways to deal with their grief or handle their grief, and finding people that are really surprised that they hadn't thought about it, but they really are happy even though they're grieving. And that was kind of a confirmation to me that I was doing the right thing. And the people that come to my group, we write together, they like the idea of having something positive related to what's going on in their life at this time. So that's what I do. I write, I read a lot, I podcast, and I'm enjoying my life on Hawaii and all the people that I'm meeting in the process of doing this work.

Such a cool way to combine the two really vast possibilities of feelings and reactions. And I have also lost other people in my life. The first really close person I lost was my second husband, my late husband, who was a blind skydiver. And I've talked about him on this podcast. And then in July 2023, I lost my dad and most recently my son Tim in February of this year. And every time I've experienced a loss, there's been a period of time where I am trying to get my center back. And this happiness work that I discovered when I discovered Marci Shaimov through the Year of Miracles and then read the book, book Happy for no Reason, and then became a certified happiness trainer, I have gotten to a point now where even when my world is shaken, such as losing my son, I can bounce back more quickly. It's not that I forget, but I have moments present, moments of happiness, and I'm finding that I am laughing a little bit every day. And right now we're talking about loss due to death, but we also go through other kinds of losses, such as losing a job, losing a marriage to divorce, maybe losing a home. If you've been a victim of a fire, as many people in Maui and around the country and the world have been, there's a time when we are seeking to find our centers again. And writing and journaling is a really helpful way to do this work. Especially if you feel like people don't always want to hear your story over and over again. Of course, it's really important to find support where you can talk in real time, but writing can be helpful. You may remember that I produced a previous episode and my guest was Angie Apeta, and we talked about using writing to express our feelings. And Emily, could you maybe tell us a little more about your books? Could you give us some highlights?

Sure, I'd be happy to do that. I'm also a happy for no reason trainer, so that's what makes it easy to write about happiness. And I love to talk about happiness. But with my books, when my friend's husband died and I wrote those notes to her, I. I thought, this is an outline for a book. And since it was for a whole year, I thought, well, that sounds like 52 chapters. Well, 52 chapters is a really long book. So I ended up publishing two different books that have one of them. They each have 26 chapters. And with those books, each book is based on one of those cards that I wrote. And so they're on all different kinds of topics that have to do with. With grief and happiness. And it has stories about what I did or thoughts about how you can deal with. With grief and how you can find happiness. And dude, the chapters are really varied because there's so many different subjects surprised me. The most popular chapter is called Crying in the Car. And I've had so many people see that and go, oh, crying in the car. I thought I was the only one that did that, but I, I did that at one point in my life when I had a really significant loss. And it seemed like whenever I was alone in the car, it was a time when it, the tears came and it. I. I realized that it was okay that, that I should just let him come and that I must have been holding him back other times that it would be nice to not feel constricted by the tears. And it really helped me with, with dealing with all the different feelings and emotions that I was having when I was realizing that there was a place where I felt safe to cry, that I didn't have to worry about if anybody was going to see me or what they'd think of me, or they would be thinking, oh, is she still grieving? And. Which is a kind of ridiculous question that people have sometimes. They just don't quite understand the concept that grief is, is another form of love. And as long as you have those feelings of love for somebody, you're still going to grieve them, you're still going to miss them. But that doesn't have to be negative. That can be memories that, that are just beautiful. So. But I talk about other things in the book too, like cleaning out your closets and why it's important to do that and how it helps. Helps you to move forward in your grief when you do that. And as I said, There's 52 chapters, so each one of them is different between the two books. And there's so much to learn and so much to think about. And in the grief and happiness Handbook, I also have at the end of each chapter, things for you to write about. And it's, it's a whole. You don't have to write, choose to write them all you don't have to choose to write it at all, but if you do, it can help you better. And there are things like to write an affirmation about what you learned or write there's like, five different things on each chapter that it says, try writing about this and see what happens. So it's really combining the process of. Of happiness, grief, and writing to deal with it all at the same time.

When I lost my husband, I started participating in a group for widows and widowers through the American Council of the Blind, a community call that got started during the pandemic because the people in the community, the leadership in that community, wanted to provide space for us who already with vision impairments, have a hard time getting out into community. They wanted to provide space to reduce that sense of isolation. And I found the group for widows and widowers. And one thing that someone said at one of those meetings was they were kind of hurt and getting tired of feeling like people wanted us to get over it or move on. And they said, grief isn't about moving on. It's about moving forward and taking all those parts of ourselves and parts of the people we love with us. And those memories make our lives even more poignant and richer. So do you find that. That you are retaining those memories but still moving forward? What would be an example of how you're moving forward?

Well, that. That's a really interesting thing because. Really bothers me when I hear somebody say, well, she's still grieving. I thought, well, yeah, you probably didn't. Because if. If you haven't dealt with that kind of a loss, it's kind of hard to understand just how significant and deep it can be for you. And it's. It's really important to kind of go through the process, and the process is different for everybody. So you have to pay attention and see what it is you need and what would bring you comfort and how that can be. And I have found that. That my. My writing helps me a whole lot with that moving forward. And that's exactly how I describe it, is it's moving forward. You're not getting over it. You're not getting rid of it. You're moving forward in. In your life is. As well as in your grief. And it's a very natural part of living. It comes to everybody. Anybody who was born will die. And it's not uncommon at all to have a lot of pressure from people saying, well, you know, can't you do something else? Or, you know, you cry too much. I think that's why that crying in the car chapter is so popular. It's important to put things in perspective that because you've had some kind of a loss, and as Darian said, it's not always the loss by death, it can be the loss when an election doesn't turn out the way you wanted it to, that can be devastating. There's all kinds of things. You could have a cherished pet, and if that pet isn't with you anymore, that can be really hard. So there's. There's lots of different kinds of grief. And if you kind of wallowed in each time something happened to you that you would grieve for, you wouldn't have time left for your life, your experiences, your ability to live with some joy in your life. And everybody should be or not should be, everybody's entitled to some joy in their life. But you got to let it in, you've got to allow it. And you don't need to listen to people who are trying to rush you through the process. The process is whatever it is for you, and it's different for everybody. And if somebody says something like that to you, like, aren't you over that yet? Just say, I'm. I'm working my way forward. And you don't have to respond to that. Chances are they haven't. They either haven't had a significant loss to deal with or they haven't dealt with it. If they have, when they say something like that. So if you can be positive and supportive in your response to them, they might soften up a little bit to the whole concept.

In fact, you might be a model, because we never know, as I found out, when you might be called upon, when you might be called upon to be with someone in their loss that they didn't expect. But I want to go back to that word, joy, because not only have I lost people through death, but I've had some other significant losses. And just before COVID I had a falling out with a community of friends. And sometimes I think when you have a significant loss, like I, like, like I did losing my husband, sometimes you have other losses before you get your momentum back. And I sat down and wrote a list of things that used to give me joy, and I went about adding some of those things back into my life. For example, I used to play the autoheart when I was a child, and I had one. So I went and bought another one and started singing again. And I decided to move into my own home. And I purchased my own home pretty much with a little help from my Sister and a mortgage broker. But my first home I bought was with my husband, and this one I did on my own. And that was a really wonderful sense of accomplishment. And I used to walk around saying, I am ecstatically happy. And I got a housemate who has a wonderful sense of humor. And we share a puppy, who is the most quirky puppy. And she vocalizes more than any other dog I've ever had. And so she makes me laugh every day. And so one way I am finding to help myself with my own healing and recovery is to put joy back into my life and give myself permission to appreciate and notice and name the present moments. The little moments have a big impact when we're healing. And if we can stay in the present moment, it's. It's one way to get our center back. So did you go about adding any piece of joy back into your life, Emily?

Oh, absolutely. I have found that for something that works really well for me is writing lists. And when you said you wrote a list, I thought, that's so cool, because it's a great way to work through things. And if you get kind of in a funk sometime and say, I'm not happy about anything, turn that around and say, I'm so happy. That. And fill in the blank. I know when, after Jacques, my first husband who died, I felt kind of blank, kind of almost emotionless after a while because I just didn't know what to think or do or I just felt really empty. And someone suggested that I watch the movie the Secret. And in that, they've got a big emphasis on gratitude. And I thought, I don't have anything to be grateful for. My husband died. And it kind of stopped myself and said, why in the world are you saying that? There's got to be something that you're grateful for or something you're happy about. So make a list. So I started writing down things I was grateful for, and I got excited about it, actually. The more things that I found, the more things that I could think of. And I. I felt like I was. I told myself I was addicted to gratitude because I just had to keep writing it down when I'd be in the bank and pull a receipt out of my purse so that I could write something down so I wouldn't forget it when I went to want, wanted to write it in my journal. I think that doing a list for a lot of different things works really well, and that in particular, to do something about things that have brought me happiness in the past or things I plan on doing now to be happy and making a commitment to doing some of those things that I wrote down. I didn't just write them. I. I did them. And another thing that I did was around. My husband died in February. And when it got time for New Year's, I thought, oh, shoot, I don't even want to think about this. And I'm not going to write any. Any resolutions, because, like everybody, nobody keeps those things. So I thought, okay, what. What can I do? I'm going to focus on one thing for this year, just one thing that I'm gonna do that's different than what I've done before. And so I. I meditated quite a bit, trying to figure out what. What was the one thing that would be the most important for me to do. And what I came up with, it was loud and clear, was that I was supposed to accept invitations. And I thought, that's. That's crazy. Nobody's inviting me to do anything. That's why I'm sitting home by myself all the time. And then I thought, well, maybe that's why I'm sitting home all by myself, because I'm not putting myself out there to be welcoming to invitations. So I said, I don't know where this is going to lead, but I'm going to accept invitations when they come. And, boy, did they. Once. Once I made that commitment, the invitations were amazing, and they weren't anything that I would have thought of on my own. I kind of had to put it out there into the universe. And then the ideas came to me, and I did things like I was asked to be on the editorial board for a year at the newspaper, and it was a very large newspaper in the community where I lived. And we did really interesting things that year. Just fascinating. Met lots of people, and I really enjoyed doing that. Another thing was I had started going to a trainer because I kind of let myself go. I wasn't particularly strong or healthy, and I wanted to build back up my strength. And my trainer happened to be a distance bicycle racer, and he invited me to be on his team on a couple of different races. And one of them was a race that. That took most of the people in it well over 24 hours with. Without stopping. The. We had. And in this race, we had teams of two, so only one of them would be on the bike at the same time. So they weren't biking that entire 24 hours. But. And this guy was so good that he generally won the race, and he did that year, but the driver didn't show up. Who was supposed to drive the follow car and I ended up driving the follow car for 24 hours. So that was a new experience for me. But I saw things that I never would have before because you don't go over like 26 miles an hour, which is pretty fast when in a bicycle race for that long. But as I was going that slow, I was able to really look around. Generally when you're driving you don't see as much because you're looking at the road. And I still had to do that, of course, but I it was beautiful and, and driving through the desert in the middle of the night with just the stars and the moon, it was gorgeous. And what were some other things? Some. Somebody asked me, she was taking her sister to South Africa for the summer in, in the summer and she asked me if I'd like to go. And I never thought about going to South Africa before, but it was an amazing, amazing experience which opened me up to doing other travel that I liked that I hadn't thought about doing on my own. So starting by making that gratitude list to start off with led to all these other experiences led me to getting out of my head and feeling sorry for myself. But to see what I could enjoy, what I could experience that things that I, I wouldn't have thought of and I doubt if I would have met Ron, my next husband, had I not been in that position of saying yes to invitations.

Sometimes things that we don't expect to happen to us, such as loss, lead to new and beautiful experiences. And I hear that quite often from people who were able bodied at one point and then lose a faculty or become disabled in some way and they learn so much more about themselves and become deeper thinkers and more thoughtful and more grateful. And while I would not wish loss on any of you out there, I know that there is still hope and life. And Emily has given us some really wonderful examples of that as we close Emily so I'm wondering if you have a favorite quote or if you have your grief and happiness card deck handy if you have a parting quote or affirmation that you can share that would be helpful for our listeners to keep in mind as we move forward.

Sure. I do have my card deck MD and what I like to do is just kind of reach in and pull out a card when somebody asks me for something like that. So I'll just pull out whatever card comes to me and that must be what you need to hear this day. So this, this is it. This card is entitled you are beautiful. When grieving, you may find times that you aren't paying attention to how you look. You may not take time to wash your hair or care about what you're wearing. When you notice this happening, find time for self love. Take a long bath, take a walk or treat yourself to new clothes. Commit to doing something special just for you. Because the little things that make such a difference in your journey, you deserve to feel good.

Beautiful. And it ties back to our April episode on self love and finding those gems. Emily, thank you so much for being my guest and our guest on this episode. And since you're from Hawaii, I will say aloha. Thank you.

Yes, aloha to you for the invitation. Thank you so much.

Thank you for joining me. Today on get what you need and feel good about it. Remember, when you speak up for yourself assertively, you will get what you need and feel good about it. You will also be showing respect for yourself and for the other people in your life who are important to you. Until next time, try thinking about it Like Stephanie Lahart says it say what you mean, mean what you say, but don't say it.

Mean before it gets too late. And the only way to do this is with hope, not a hate. Yes, the only way to do this.

Is with hope not ha.