So when it comes to divorce and loss or the end of a relationship and loss, the term, there is ambiguous loss. So it's this idea that. Something has ended, a relationship with another person has ended, but the people are still alive. It's just that the way they connect is different. Now, if you're going through a divorce or thinking about getting a divorce, this is the podcast for you hosted by Morgan Stockville, the head of family law at the largest family law firm in the country, and comedian Andrea Rappaport.

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I was just thinking the other day that one of the reasons why getting a divorce is so stressful and so hard. Because while you're trying to make these decisions and get through this legal process, you're also grieving. I think that we often don't put that term on what we're going through. You know, like people will say, oh, I'm feeling a lot of feelings.

I'm processing trauma. Obviously like I'm sad, but I think that we are afraid to put that. Big word like grieving, um, on what we're feeling. 'cause that feels so heavy. And I think a lot of times we think, well that word needs to be reserved for like a death and nobody died, so I'm not really grieving. But you are.

And it's not only grieving the loss of this life that you had, but it's also grieving the loss of what could have been because most people don't get married. Thinking that one day they're going to be here, and even though we talk about this all the time, your lives are gonna get so much better so soon and that it's totally true, but you're still going through something right now, and the longer that you don't address what you're going through emotionally, the longer that these feelings just.

Float in you and they grow. They don't just float, they grow and they're gonna take over. They will bubble to the surface. So today we're gonna play parts of a conversation that we had with a woman named Rebecca Fein Gloss. She is an expert on grief and we, uh, thought that this would be so important to.

Share with all of you because there's so much here that is so powerful and so true and will really help you all feel less alone, even just listening to it. Now, when I was editing this episode, I'm thinking like, oh my God. That's so true. I recorded this episode. It's like, it's like when you go back and you read a book that you read years ago and you're like, oh my God, I forgot about this part, or I forgot that this still speaks to me years later.

So take a listen. Okay, so we talked about it, but we all know the association between grief and death. But what about grief and divorce? Let's be real here. Divorce can totally be a huge, major loss in somebody's life, right? And it's not only in like the traditional way that we view loss, but divorce is also the loss of the idea that.

Things are not panning out the way you expected. Most people don't get married expecting for their marriage to end in divorce. Right? And I do see this with a lot of my clients. And the tricky part about grief and divorce, you know, typically what I see in a normal grieving situation, you know, the death of somebody close to you.

You might take a few days off of work, you might go get your head right, kind of relax, come back. In divorce with my clients, you know, you're in the thick of it. There's no just stepping back. You've got family, you've got kids, you've got a, you know, you can't call up your, your boss and say, I just, you know, need to take a few days off.

I'm having a bad divorce day. So I see so much agony when they're navigating divorce process, and it's usually coming from, what I'm thinking is unprocessed grief. And it's interesting what you just said about not being able to go to your boss and say, I'm having a bad day because of my divorce, because I think our, um, guest has something to say about that.

On today's episode, friends of How Not to Suck a Divorce, we are speaking with Rebecca Fein Gloss. She is the founder of Grieve Leave. It's a foundation created to help support those who are processing grief in all the areas in which grief can stem from. She's gonna help us unpack some of the misconceptions about grief and offer some very clear action steps for support.

Rebecca? Hi. Welcome to How Not To Suck a Divorce. Hey, wonderful women. It is so great to see y'all's faces. I will say y'all like a million times, which I only become cognizant of when I'm talking to people not from the South. So, hey, my Midwestern friends, so, so great to connect. It's all right. Um, I was born, I was not born, but I was raised in Texas, so your y'alls are landing in a very comfortable place for me and for me.

I'm just confused all around, but I like, it feels exciting and I'll take y'all. So anyway, Rebecca, let's start, y'all. Let's talk about your background a little bit. First of all, loving your energy. You're so high energy where Andrea and I have been like. Empty all night. You come in, you're like, okay. I'm thinking, wow, we gotta ramp this up.

So thank you for that. You served as a senior early childhood policy advisor for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, and an early childhood policy associate for the Chicago Mayor's Office, which is kind of where we're located. And then something happened in your personal life that led you to start grieve Leaf, is that right?

Yeah, I mean, I think my life was structured in this really beautiful way, Morgan, that I, um, had a very linear approach to my career. I was very focused on working in public service. I started my career as an early childhood educator actually with Teach for America. And then I went back to school at the University of Chicago, worked in the mayor's office of Chicago.

It was very cold there. Um, very cold. But I, I loved the work and I got to come home to North Carolina and serve my home state, which was a privilege. And what I didn't recognize until. Later was that so much of my approach to my career and my life was actually quite rooted in grief, and that is because my mother died when I was a a kid.

She died of a glioblastoma that's brain cancer, particularly deadly type. When I was 13, she was diagnosed when I was five. I think I got the message loud and clear as a kid that, okay, when you experience something really hard, everyone praises you when you get. In this case back to school or you show up.

High energy or you show up looking nice wherever you are being productive. And so no one ever really thought I was struggling and I didn't know I was struggling. It was just kind of my baseline. I got married somewhere in this like beautiful linear life I had created for myself of achievement, and it all came to a head for me.

When my father died really suddenly on day one of COVID lockdown when I was in the governor's office of North Carolina, figuring out how we were gonna shut down schools, and that was like the beginning of this unraveling of this beautiful linear life I had created. A year after my dad died, I decided to end my marriage that I had put a lot of, uh, energy and effort into for, we were together for 10 years, married for six, and ultimately I felt incredibly overwhelmed as I think anyone would be facing that many losses by the age of what, 31.

And I knew that grief had something to do with how I was feeling, but I just didn't have the vocabulary for it. So. I left the job that I loved. It was, we pivoted to working on statewide COVID response at that point, and I took a year off on what I called grieve leave. That was all of 2022. I spent every single day writing about and exploring and traveling and doing all kinds of things to learn what grief actually was.

'cause I, I just didn't know, and I didn't know what grieving meant. Like what do you actually do with all these feelings? Um, that blog took off and it resonated with a lot of people, particularly. We'll be talking so much more about this, particularly talking about how we grieve a divorce and like what that even looks like.

Yeah. And uh, and I started a company this year as a result of the success of that blog and how much. Young people in particular are really seeking more support when it comes to grief and grieving. So we're gonna talk more about your company in just a minute, but what I wanna ask you first is, let's talk about some of these misconceptions about grief and divorce.

What are some of the most common ones that you hear? Because what comes up for me is I think a lot of people think, I'm not grieving. That's not, I'm not grieving. It's not a thing. I'm angry. I hate his guts, but I'm not grieving. Right. So what are some of these ones that you come across or that maybe you experienced firsthand?

We should level set like what is grief and what is grieving? Grief is this collection of emotions that we feel as a result of any kind of a loss. It doesn't matter if that's a death related loss. It doesn't matter if that is a loss of a relationship, whether that's divorce or. Um, a breakup or the end of a platonic friendship.

I mean, there are all kinds of losses that we feel grief about, and that grief does not always look like tears. It does not always look like sadness. It can look like anger. It can look like a deep sense of disappointment. Sometimes grief can even look like joy or nostalgia. We feel really grateful, even in the midst of our grief.

And then grieving is how we come to terms with those feelings, which can look a 1,000,001 in different ways when it comes to divorce. I don't think anyone automatically like. Associates the word grief with divorce, it just doesn't come to mind. We're not, we as a society are not taught to talk about grief, period, like even death related grief, let alone this shame filled idea that how dare someone whose marriage quote unquote failed, which I think is bullshit.

Like no one's marriage fails, marriages end. It's a contract. That contract came to an end. Thank you for that. Your check is in the mail. Of course. God, I just wanna like scream that from the rooftops, no one is a failure because they got divorced or because someone divorced them, right? Like no party is a failure, but there is grief in the end of that relationship.

There is grief in the end of the possibility of what you thought might be true in this marriage that you worked so hard on. And I think there's a misconception that if you chose to end that marriage in particular, that you don't have a right. To grieve. Grieve. You don't have a right to feel any kind of a sense of loss, and let's debunk that right now.

I mean, I chose to end my marriage. It was the best choice that I have ever made in my life, and it was incredibly difficult and I still to this day feel grief about that decision because of the loss of this possibility that I thought we would have this future I thought we would have together. Okay, so for you, because that's what I wanted to ask you for you.

Feels like you're talking about grieving. What could have been. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I okay. I mean, I got married when I was 26. That's young for the south though. That's what they do in the south. Y'all so young. You know, it's funny, just babies that's old for the south, it's, I mean, we were the fir, I was the first of my friends to get married and the first of my friends to get divorced.

But you know, I love to be a leader, A revolution girl. Here we are. But Right. Like I, we worked so hard in that marriage to make it work that we left it all on the field. And even though I was the person at the end who ultimately said it's. This is over. I still grieve the possibility. Like I was always very hopeful about the marriage and about the relationship and that if I just worked harder, things would get better because that had been true in my life, mostly up until then, right?

That linear kind of cycle and it that is not true wellbeing. So let's talk just for a second about this idea. There are these stages, the five stages of grief, and we hear about this stuff all the time, and I'm sure you all have heard about, oh, there are five stages to grief, and for those of you who need a refresher, there is this theory that's out there on the interwebs that's from, I believe, goes back to like the 70.

You go through five stages of the grieving process, and those stages are. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then acceptance. So you, I chatted a while ago about. I would just love for you to share your thoughts with our how not to suck a divorce audience on the five stages with my air quotes of grief, the five stages of grief.

How do I like put this delicately? They're not real, don't like, it's just not, that's not real life, but we all wish it. Were true. This came out of a specific study in the seventies. You're exactly right, by Elizabeth Kubler Ross, a really well renowned researcher who was focusing on studying cancer patients who were dying and how they confronted their own mortality.

And I guess that study had like the best PR campaign of all time. And also like I think we as Americans. Want believe that grieving and grief comes in these neat orderly stages, that if we just get through them. We win, we have grief. There's an ending. It's over. Woo-hoo. You made it to the castle of Candy Land, right?

It has no grief in it, right? Like best castle ever. But that's just not true. Anyone who has been through a loss knows that's not true. That's not how grief works. There is no bookend to say, oh, you're done now. You have accepted this loss. And I think we see examples of this all the time. A really simple one is with a divorce is, you know, I was in the grocery store.

Not that long ago, and I heard my first dance song play over the loudspeaker. That song still associates comes with a lot of feeling with it. For me, it triggers grief for me. So sure I'm not totally done grieving, quote unquote. When am I ever done? I'm not gonna forget that I was married. I'm not gonna forget that I had love for this person, and that's okay.

That's so normal. Grief doesn't. And end after these five stages are over. I'm really glad that you said that because I think for a lot of people, if they experienced what you just illustrated, they would see that moment as a failure. Mm. Right. They would see it as a setback, like, oh my God, I can't believe I've been divorced for four years.

I can't believe that I am tearing up now standing in the aisle of Whole Foods because you know, Ajovy is playing right. No, Bon Joli was not my first dance song. Stop rolling. I'm just, I was trying to think. It was definitely not living on a prayer, although it shoulda have been, but like, you know, but, but it's not, that is not a setback.

And I, and I just love that you said that. My question for you, Rebecca, is how do you think grief. Differs from losing somebody close to you in a divorce? Like does it differ? Is it exactly the same? What's the trajectory of that differential? I mean that's, that's the beauty in all of this, right? When we experience grief and loss of all different kinds, it helps us be able to connect to one another.

And even just coming back to what you were saying, Andrea, like you're not a failure if you tear up at a song later, you're literally human. Like you're a human being with feelings, and that is so normal. There are. One of the amazing things that I think about, uh, founding a company that is focused on grief and grieving is learning the scope of different grief related terms.

There are for different types of losses. So when it comes to divorce and loss or the end of a relationship and loss, the term, there is ambiguous loss. So it's this idea that. Something has ended, a relationship with another person has ended, but the people are still alive. It's just that the way they connect is different now, and that sense of ambiguous loss to me actually feels really reminiscent of my grandmother dying of old age.

And that feeling of anticipatory grief of that, the way that we related to one another kind of died over time. We couldn't connect in the same ways that we could over time, but she was still alive. And to me that actually felt similar in some ways to how the grief felt of my divorce. That connection really changed.

He's still here, and I'm still here. It's all grief, it's all just different kind of sides of this coin, but that loss looks different. I think a lot of people go through with a divorce. The grief and the loss of how their life is changing. The fact that when they go to school functions, it looks different now, right?

They might lose some of their friends in the process, you know, if they're couple friends or, you know, things like that. I know that, I know lots of people who talk about the fact that one of the hardest parts for them and they got divorced. It's like the social side of it, the, the cultural side of getting divorced.

Mourning the loss of losing your home that you worked so hard to buy. Even the financial loss. You've worked so hard for all this money and now you've gotta fucking give half of it over to her. She sucks. Right? For me, and I've been. Very open about this. The hardest part of my divorce was the loss, and I still grieve this not having my kids every day.

Right? I talk about it so much that I imagine that as I'm saying it right now, our listeners are like, yes, bitch. We've heard that's all you talk about, but like. That to me is something that will, it always feels like it's going to sting. And I remember going back to what you said before about it not being a failure.

I remember crying just recently in therapy saying, shouldn't I be over it by now? Shouldn't I be better by now? Like at what point am I not gonna be emotional over this shit? It's been four years, but it's not linear. You're making me think of something, Andrea. That is a common refrain. I have gotten since day one of people hearing that I was getting divorced and I was 31.

Often people were like, oh, well, at least you didn't have kids. All the time. I, I still hear that now. Yeah. Yeah. At least you didn't have kids. Okay, so couple things here. First of all, just a general piece of advice. Don't say something to someone who is grieving that starts with the words, at least, it's just probably not a good sentence.

You're trivializing, whatever that person is feeling. So just like if you, if the words at least are starting to come out of your mouth, just stop whatever you're saying and like, rephrase.

Feel grief, even though we didn't share children together. But you point out this really like tough thing that divorced parents have to face. You are forever connected by your children. I don't have that connection with my ex. I have plenty of other connections with my ex mutual friends photos that pop up on my Facebook memories every fucking day, even though I think I've deleted the last one, and I just never seem to have deleted all of them.

Those connections persist, right? So that grief persists, and that's real. It's okay. It doesn't mean you're a failure because these connections persist and you have emotions related. You know, no grief should be minimized. It doesn't matter if you had kids in a divorce or not. It doesn't matter if you had two dogs that you were upset about that you had to divide up or somebody got the dogs, or maybe it was, you're very special.

Ornament from the Christmas tree. It doesn't matter. Whatever it is. And it can, I think from what I see with my clients, it can pop up on random stupid things that you get set off on, and that's still grief related to your divorce. And so the question I have for you is how, you know this might be ridiculous of a question.

How does a listener sitting there being like, yeah, I'm going through a divorce. It sucks. I don't like my ex, I'm in a shitty place, but how do I know if I'm actually grieving? How does, how does one know if they're grieving? It's not a dumb question at all. Like there's nothing ridiculous about that. It's a very normal question, first of all, like if you're human and you've interacted with other human beings or have ever loved something, whether that's a pet or something else.

Probably experienced grief, especially if you are an adult, right? Like you have experienced the loss of something, and so whether you recognize it or not, there is grief in you. When it comes to grieving. I would differentiate and say, are you creating space? For the feelings of grief that you have, and maybe you are grieving intentionally or unintentionally, maybe your grief is popping up in ways that you didn't expect through maybe demonstrating your anger or frustrations through really dangerous coping mechanisms like drinking too much that's grieving.

Or maybe you are grieving in a. An intentional way, creating space for your feelings. Like, um, some people in the world apparently like to run as a way to like help them. I don't understand them. Like good for them. Who are those people who, I've never done that successfully as a way to like, make space for my own feelings.

Meditation has been really good for me as a way to grieve and like get quiet and create space. People are creative. They write, they paint. All of those ways are intentional grieving. You are making space to recognize the grief that you have. Even if you're just like getting quiet for five minutes and you wake up in the morning and set an extra alarm and call it like your grief alarm and play a sad song that's grieving if you're doing it on purpose to acknowledge that you have grief in you.

But yeah, I mean like if you're human, I hate to break it to you. You have grief going on like it's in there. And whether you've been through something big or not divorced. A death of a close loved one, losing a Christmas ornament. I mean, that's so, that's reasonable. Morgan. People have attachment and grief to all kinds of things, and that is okay.

You're human, you are normal. All of you're grieving. Sorry, listeners. It's true. Well, on that note, okay, so you're all miserable, you're all grieving and we get it. And I think that some what we've also established that. There's not, there's not a, there's aren't, there aren't stages. Get that outta your head.

This is not a one and done experience. So let's move the conversation into what you've done about this, Rebecca, for these exact reasons you established the Grieve Leave community. So. Someone listening to our show right now has been nodding their head the entire time, right? Feeling like everything that we are saying is exactly what they've been thinking and feeling.

How can you help them? So first of all, experiencing grief is human. We cannot change the fact that every single one of us will experience loss. The only thing that we can do to feel better. Actually recognize and accept the fact that we feel that grief. We can feel a little less shitty about the fact that we're grieving.

We can connect with each other, human to human, we can surface those feelings. So those feelings feel just a little bit lighter when you try to push your grief down forever. I'm so sorry. It just doesn't work. You feel worse. And the longer all of us. Pretend like we're not grieving, the more all of us suffer.

So let's normalize grief, let's normalize conversations about grief, and that's what we're doing at grief leave. I think for your listeners in particular, I wanna highlight events that we do through grief leave. Many of them are virtual. We call our, uh, we're reinventing the idea of what a grief support group.

And we call them Meet and Grieves. This is great because like I, first of all, I love when I meet someone at a party and I'm like, oh yeah, I work, I founded an organization that focuses on grief and grieving, but I swear I'm really fun and like I have a beer in my hand when I'm telling them about this.

Like that is the thing. Our grief support. Groups, our meet and grieves don't feel like sitting together in a circle with a name tag on saying, hi, my name is in a basement. Or it doesn't feel clinical with, you know, everyone's staring at you waiting for you to say the right thing, or someone's taking notes and they're worried about you.

That's not, I don't think that's what grief support needs to look like, and in particular, there just aren't grief supports. When it comes to divorce and breakups or these other like non death kinds of grief. So our grief support groups feel very communal. They, it, it depends on which meet and grieve we're talking about.

So we've hosted them at bars, we've hosted them as like workout classes where you just get together with people that you know are going through some kind of a loss and you. Hang out and out together and divorce grieving. Is there a typical timeframe for people to go through all these feelings if they're actually like letting these feelings in and, you know, tackling them?

You know, first of all, getting divorced in America is like the worst experience of all time, and it takes forever on purpose. Our systems are really difficult to navigate, and I would say you can't really begin to approach all of your feelings, all of your grief about your divorce while you're stuck in the middle of it.

Right. So I think there is this minimum baseline of man, you've gotta legally sign that paperwork to have some kind of a sense of finality about your divorce, to really start fully processing all of those feelings. But there is no official timeline. There's no set like amount of time that is the right way to process your grief.

And if you have a friend who's going through a divorce or you yourself are going through a divorce and you're just wondering like, oh, am I doing this right, or are they doing this right? There is no right answer. However that person feels in their grief is where they are. And let them experience what it is that they feel, but there's no timeline.

So let's talk about action steps because that is something that we really pride ourselves on on this show, is that we don't want anyone to leave the show feeling like they're not better for listening to this. We want everyone to feel less alone. That's really important. What are three easy things that someone can do right now to feel a little bit better?

Number one, I would say. Give yourself a few minutes a day, even of quiet time to just like give yourself the space and that grace to feel whatever it is that you're feeling. Even if that is like five minutes while your kids are at the park and you're watching them swing from across the field or whatever.

I don't have kids, but you know, like across the park and you're watching them. You sit there for those five minutes and actually just recognize how you feel if you cry. Okay? If you laugh, okay, but give yourself that space. Maybe it's more structure than that. Maybe it is a meditation that you do. Maybe it is a journal that you whip out at the end of the night before you go to bed.

Give yourself those few minutes to get honest with you. About your grief and about how you're feeling. Thing one, you, you have to get honest with yourself about how you feel. Step two is connect with other people. You have to, grief has to be seen. That's, I think, the only thing that can really make you feel better once you recognize that grief is there.

Let yourself be seen and let those feelings be seen. You can connect with other people through platforms like ours, through grief leave.com or on Instagram, um, or also on TikTok or on Facebook. Um, that's huge. Just being seen in your feelings helps you feel less crazy and alone. And then I think the last thing that I'd recommend is try something you've never tried before, like some kind of a creative outlet maybe if you're really feeling, um, overwhelmed by your grief, particularly in the case of divorce, let's say for your listeners.

You've never tried, I don't know, a music class, you've never written a song before. Try it. I wonder how that's gonna help surface your feelings. Maybe you've, even though I trashed running earlier, sorry, you've never been a runner and you are going through your divorce right now. Maybe now is the time that you try something brand new that gives yourself a different type of outlet to feel.

An opportunity for you to explore your grief in a different way. I took a painting class. It was a disaster. No one will ever see any of those paintings that I produce. No one wants to see them, but it, it was very relaxing for me in the midst of my year of grief leave to like try something totally different, totally outside my comfort zone.

So I'd really, I'd recommend that get, try something new. What's the worst that happens? You already feel rough. This could really be the new thing that like helps you just feel a little bit better. I like it. I like it. I know one of the things that I, somebody gave me once a coloring book. Yeah. Which sounds so stupid.

But there are some funny ones out there and interesting ones. And get yourself like a new thing of markers or you know, I don't know, whatever you wanna color with. And you'd be shocked at how calm you are after about 20 minutes of doing that, you know, just with your own thoughts. And I think don't judge yourself.

Right? Like, just like what you said Morgan, like the first thing you said was like, it's so stupid. And I think we all do that anytime we wanna try something new, right? Like Rebecca with you in your art class, I feel it's like, we're like, oh my God, this is so dumb. But we gotta lean into it. Like we gotta try something different.

It's okay. It doesn't matter if it's dumb, it doesn't matter if it's coloring, it doesn't matter. Maybe you run like Phoebe Buffet from friends. Right. Okay. Run like that. Like maybe like, like whatever it is. Maybe you are a terrible dancer, but you really wanna go and take a dance class. Go take a dance class.

So let's recap these steps. So number one is to give yourself some time. Be, even if it's five minutes a day, you gotta have space. And I think, again, that reminds me of what you were talking about before, where you're saying if you suppress your feelings, they're gonna find a way to slap you in the face and probably the worst time.

So you gotta carve out some time. Yeah, right. Exactly. I mean, Morgan, I'm sure you see that all the time. Yes, yes. And you know, it's like, like the faucet it, you know, it doesn't like if you suppress your feelings. For so long, the minute one tear comes out, it's on and it's not, it's not gonna stop. And so get it out.

Get it out. Mm-hmm. Because you don't want that coming out, you know, when you're in the grocery store picking out peppers or whatever you're doing. How awkward. It happens. If you keep putting it down, do something. Do something creative. You deserve it, and it's gonna help you, and it'll help channel all of this stuff.

I mean, hey, Taylor Swift made a whole career. Out of this, right? I mean, girlfriend goes through a bad breakup. She's like, see you on stage, fool Writes a little song. $4 million later, we're still singing it. So why can't you? Truly listening to your podcast is also helping people grieve. This is a tool for grieving, so let's just name it.

It's such a, a benefit, such a support that you're providing for people. I totally think it's a grieving tool. I agree with you after listening to this too, and I have something that I'm, I have a proud moment for our podcast tonight that I want to share, so it just kind of shows us how far we've come because when we first started this podcast, and Andrew would say.

Exactly what she said tonight, which was that her, you know, biggest regret was not seeing her kids every day. She couldn't even get through that sentence on the podcast without bursting into tears. And I mean, this was even up, you know, I don't know. What season are we in? Are we in? Three? Four. Four. Okay.

This was up counting last season. Even. Same thing, crying today. Tonight she said it. There wasn't a tear. It's not that she didn't feel it. No. But she's been grieving and doing the work. Right. And, and if I did cry today, it wouldn't be a failure. It just shows that this is, you're, you're always gonna evolve, you're always gonna, you're always gonna move through this kind of stuff.

But yes, to Morgan's point, I mean, look, the show is called How Not To Suck At Divorce because I sucked at getting divorced and Morgan's. Entire career is based around helping people not make major mistakes in something that can't, you can't redo this, right? I mean, the whole way that the show was born is Morgan saw me speaking publicly about, about this.

Nightmare that I was experiencing. We thought, okay, we gotta find a way to help people together. And a lot of this has been really therapeutic for me, talking to people and helping other people not suffer the way that I suffered. So I think that you're exactly right. And I loved having this conversation.

Final thoughts, Rebecca. Before, before we say goodnight and Morgan and I pass out flat on our faces from being awake and then whatever time it is right now, 23 o'clock, um, what, what do you, what do you have for us, Rebecca? Give us, give us some final thoughts and tell everybody where they can find you.

Listen, first of all, thank you so much for having me on your grieving podcast, whether you knew it or not. Everyone around you is grieving, and that doesn't mean that everyone around you feels like shit all the time. It's just that you're human. And humans experience loss, and humans experience a lot of different feelings all the time.

We will all feel better when we just name things as grief. Just giving these feelings a name helps lighten those feelings that, I mean, that's my message for your listeners. You're not a failure. You're not weird, you're not crazy. You're just a human being and you're badass and wonderful exactly as you are, and you're so not alone.

And if you really want to feel. Not alone and see other people who are experiencing losses just like you are. Go to grieve leave.com, join our newsletter. You can sign up. There'll be a popup that comes on immediately when you go to our website, and I can't wait to connect with your listeners at our future events.

And I appreciate you guys so much. Thank you. Thank you. This has been. I don't know. Lovely conversation and I think so important, and I just, we love being able to offer people all different types of support on this show, so thanks for hanging out with us tonight. Thank you so much, Andrea. I'm kind of impressed by her as a guest.

I never thought to weave in grief and divorce, but truly that is what we're talking about. Yeah. And I love the fact that she, you know, this woman has been through so much. I mean, with, you know, losing, losing a parent and then grieving her marriage and she did something about it. I mean, this woman started a freaking foundation to help other people.

Navigate this stuff, so makes me feel like a real slacker. But more importantly, the fact that we can direct people like where to go when they feel so lost in this, I think is really great. Yeah, and I like too, that she talked about, you know, grief and how to figure out whether you are grieving, because I think everyone, when they're talking about divorce, they're always talking about trauma.

Which, which is something valid out there. But at the end of the day, you are grieving your old life, right? You're grieving what you had, right? And so, you know, what we want you to know is that there's help out there. There's community out there. That's what we're here for. We do this to make you feel less alone.

We do this to bring up things that maybe get you thinking, but ultimately, hopefully you walk away from this episode thinking, okay, there's other people that have been through this crap. And my life will be okay at some point soon. Yep, that's exactly right. You might not be okay right now, but okay. And better than Okay is out there is on the horizon, baby.

So keep swimming and that's why we do the show, right? We are that, or that you need as you feel like you are aimlessly floating through. Ocean. We have Got you. You keep going, right? You can do this. And friends, if you are in the boat of listening to the show right now and you have not even started your divorce process and you are thinking.

I don't know if I can fucking do this. You can fucking do this. You can do this, you will do this and you will be okay. Go check out our community on Facebook. The How Not To Suck At Divorce Community is there to give you some more insight, give you some bonus interviews with our guests, some laughs, some memes, anything and everything that you need to help you get through this.

That's right. And remember, divorce is marathon. It is not a sprint. Someday, it's literally day by day. Other times it's hour by hour, and that's okay. And again, we do this for you. So if you like our show, send it out to your coworker, to your friend, to your ex. We don't care. Anyone who you think it could help.

And at the end of the day, if you like it, please rate and review us. It means the world to us. And send us a dm. We always respond to every message. And remember, friends, on your really worst days, absolute worst days, you're doing it, you're still doing it. Lean on us. We're here for you. Go back and listen to old episodes.

Write something in the private community. If you don't have the divorce crash course and you're just starting your divorce process, go grab the Divorce Crash course. Go check out all of the other products we have on our website that can help you. And remember, you've got this. And we've got you. The How not to Suck a Divorce Podcast cannot be copied or rebroadcast without consent.

This podcast does not contain legal advice. The information provided on the podcast and the resources available are not intended as, and shall not be construed or understood to be legal advice.