Lean Into Your Faith, Face Your Fears

06/22/18 • 10 min

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 know but came to realize later was that job in New Orleans gave me the opportunity to spend the last year of my mother’s life near her instead of being long distance. We saw each other almost every weekend during that time.

Because of these and many more God-orchestrated experiences, I chose to live that day. Knowing that my faith in God had prepared me to handle the trauma/loss that I experienced in 2005, that his plans were not to harm me, but to prepare me for my future, for such a time as this, healing began, and I could face my fear.

Fear is one of the many faces of grief and also one of the pitfalls of grief. Because we are dealing with new or unfamiliar territory after we experience trauma/loss, fear can cause anxiety and stress (another pitfall of grief) that keeps us stuck if not acknowledged. If not dealt with, fear can paralyze you. Let me remind you that fear and faith cannot live in the same house and you must choose one or the other. What is the purpose of fear? For some it is sur...

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Give Yourself Permission to Grieve

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 shootings, murder-suicides and other violence manifesting itself in the world on what seems like every day no is because we as humans are walking around with so much unresolved grief. Why do we grieve? We grieve because we loved the person or that thing or situation that added value to our lives. No one can tell you when or how long to grieve because your grief journey is unique to you.

Often you hear that there are 5 stages of grief that everyone must go through as if you go through those 5 stages and it is over. 1. Denial; 2. Anger; 3. Bargaining; 4. Depression; 5. Acceptance. The Kübler-Ross model, or the five stages of grief, theorized a series of emotions experienced by terminally ill patients prior to death. Most times the stages don’t occur in order. Some people never experience depression. Or they are angry before you may work through denial.

Some losses/trauma may require the person to work through shock before denial. There is no right order; your journey is unique to you. No one knows the relationship...

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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...