Nathalie Himmelrich

Inspiring Hope | Finding healthy ways of Grieving | Writer

partner loss

Nathalie Himmelrich on Trauma and Its Impact on the Nervous System | Episode 40

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HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is completely self, funded, produced, and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich.
Consider making a small donation to support the Podcast here. Thank you! 

For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website, join the podcast’s Instagram page, and subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

Nathalie Himmelrich Trauma and Its Impact on the Nervous System

Todays Episode 

All trauma involves grief but not all grief needs to necessarily be or feel traumatic.

When is a loss also traumatic and when is it not? 

What are the differences between a traumatic loss and a non-traumatic loss?

Why and how does it matter? 

How can we support ourselves and others after a traumatic loss?    

All these questions and more are the topics for today’s episode.

Nathalie’s links: Website | Instagram

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Examples of losses that can be traumatic 
  • The difference between traumatic and non-traumatic losses
  • Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
  • Trauma response in the body 
  • Polyvagal theory and its application to trauma
  • Nervous system regulation
  • The importance of trauma-informed, grief-literate professional care

Resources mentioned in this episode

  • Dr. Stephens Porges’s Polyvagal Theory 

Thank you for listening!

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

Mira Simone on Grief Literacy and Somatic Trauma Work | Episode 38

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HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is completely self, funded, produced, and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich.
Consider making a small donation to support the Podcast here. Thank you! 

For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website, join the podcast’s Instagram page, and subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

Mira Simone

I’m so excited to talk to Mira, an inspirational woman, dealing with the loss and trauma of her partner. I found her through Instagram, where she shares authentically about her journey through her voice that connects with many other grievers, not just young widows. She shares about Brian’s death which came very quickly, within 7 weeks of his second diagnosis, and how she finds her way back to living life as a young widow. 
 Mira and I speak a common language and share the purpose of teaching people to become grief literate and the importance of working with a trauma-informed lens, which for both of us is the basis of dealing with grief and trauma. 

About this week’s guest 

Mira Simone is a widow, mother, published writer, grief coach, and grief-literacy advocate. She is also a registered mental health occupational therapist in Ontario, Canada. In early 2019, Mira’s life was blown apart, when her partner Brian was diagnosed with an unbelievably aggressive cancer. He died seven weeks later, leaving her alone with their almost three-year-old daughter. Prior to Brian’s death, she worked in the mental health space. But it wasn’t until his death that Mira began to explore the grieving process. In 2022, she launched New Moon Mira, her grief coaching business, through which she supports widows and grievers in more intimate group containers and provides grief literacy training for grief-support people and healthcare professionals. She is currently in the early stages of writing a memoir, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Mira’s links: Website | Instagram

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Growing up with her Dad’s chronic illness (Parkinson’s)
  • Mira’s husband dying from melanoma (skin cancer)
  • Relational (developmental) trauma triggered through the current loss
  • Traveling and going on adventures helped her to figure grief out on her own
  • Developing an understanding of grief and the nervous system

Thank you for listening!

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. Support the show

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Shannon Traphagen on Vulnerability and Loneliness as a Widow | Episode 36

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Shannon Traphagen

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is completely self, funded, produced, and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich.
Consider making a small donation to support the Podcast here. Thank you! 

Today on the podcast I am speaking with Shannon Traphagen about the loss of the love of her life and best friend from brain cancer. She so beautifully describes feeling rudderless and lost after having spent all her adult life with her husband. Before her husband’s diagnosis, they were on the road to adoption but due to his illness, they also lost that option. Shannon slept downstairs on the couch for a year to avoid the loneliness of the bedroom she had shared with her husband and the baby’s room across the hallway. She slowly worked her way back into embracing her life and now helps others through her podcast. Shannon speaks about vulnerability and loneliness, a topic she feels is not discussed enough in grief. 

About this week’s guest 

Shannon Traphagen, MSW, is a published author, motivational grief & loss speaker, patient advocate, and host of The Game On Glio Podcast. A show centered around the stories of brain cancer patients, caregivers, doctors, researchers, therapists, and grief and loss journeys. With a background in magazine publishing, social work, and modern media, Shannon is also walking through her own grief journey after losing her 45-year-old husband to Glioblastoma two years ago. She now helps others through her podcast and her own experiences, bridging the gap in communication between patients/families, widows, and the medical community. She is also the founder of Traphagen’s Trail Ride 4 Brain Cancer, a cycling fundraiser which has raised over $30,000 to date for brain cancer clinical trials. 

Shannon’s links:

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Miscarriages
  • The diagnosis of brain cancer of her husband led to the loss of adoption in the process
  • The death of her husband from glioblastoma
  • How to come to ‘I’m ok with this (loss)’ 
  • Vulnerability and loneliness
  • Secondary losses
  • Finding resilience through creating meaning

Resources mentioned in this episode

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website. 

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page.

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

Amber Jackson on Life as a Young Widow with Four Children | Episode 27

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Consider making a small donation to support the Podcast here. Thank you! 

Amber Jackson
Amber Jackson

Today on the podcast I am speaking with Amber, a young widow, and divorcee who now raises four children on her own. She lost her husband Tim just seven months ago after a 16-months battle with cancer. She now is the captain steering the ship of her family, running a household with four children under twelve, at the same time as tending to her grief and her own needs.

Amber is a guiding light as to the resilience she draws from, inspiring with her version of grieving seeing it as a sacred time while also growing and evolving as her own person and in her life after the loss of her soulmate. She believes that ‘laughing means singing Tim’s song’ and it is a way to show her love for him. 

About this week’s guest 

Amber Jackson is a mom of four (one with special needs) and a cancer widow but that hasn’t stopped her from living life to the fullest. She is a self-proclaimed life enthusiast and is determined to see everything that life has to offer, including the bad, as something she can learn from. She loves tulips, pizza Friday, and kitchen dance parties.

Visit Amber’s Instagram page here. 

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Divorced twice with two young children
  • Widowed by the age of 32 raising four children on her own
  • Support of family, friends, and church
  • Being faced with mortality and living with anticipatory grief 
  • The benefit of regular, ongoing therapy
  • Seeing grief as a sacred time

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website. 

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page.

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

Support this Podcast

To support this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe to, or follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

Remember to keep breathing, I promise, it will get easier.

Turiya Hanover on Grief in the First Year and Coming out of Trauma | Episode 26

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Turiya Hanover
Turiya Hanover

Today on the podcast I have the honor to be speaking with Turiya Hanover for the second time, revisiting her first year of grief over the loss of her partner Maia and the associated trauma. 

Turiya and I share a passion: befriending death. Not everyone’s cup of tea in terms of passions but you will enjoy listening to this episode if you are interested in looking behind the veils of life, birth, death, and everything in between. 

*Just a note on the sound quality of this episode: Given I recorded this during my sabbatical in South Africa with a different microphone than usual, the sound quality is slightly different.  

About this week’s guest 

Turiya is the co-founder of Path Retreats and the transformational process – Path of Love with Rafia Morgan. Together they also lead a one-year Holistic Counsellor training for therapists called Working with People – School of Counselling. 

She has been trained in many different modalities such as Gestalt, Bioenergetics, Psychodrama, Family Therapy (V. Satir), NLP, Hypnosis, Somatic Experiencing™ (Peter Levine), Ego Psychology, Family Constellation, Enneagram and Astrology, and Essence Work.

Turiya’s personal journey into human development started when she did her first 2-year Jungian Psychotherapy course aged 22, followed by an encounter workshop in 1970 in Germany. The revelation and exploration of this Humanistic Psychology approach took Turiya by surprise. The internal shift that she experienced was so profound, that she and her husband, set on a new course of human discovery, which led them to India. Through learning meditation, living, and working in a community under the guidance of a master, she developed a unique approach in working with people that is a synthesis of eastern insights, living awareness and western approach to humanistic psychology.

The sudden, unexpected death of her husband marked a turning point in Turiya’s life. This profound experience deeply influenced her own personal search and how she works with people today.

Today Turiya has the joy of being a grandmother and spends her free time painting and is writing a book about the rising of the feminine and about Death as a friend and the realisation of Impermanence.

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Reviewing the first year of grief and trauma
  • The ongoing connection felt with Maia
  • The fear of abandonment
  • Loneliness, aloneness, being alone and feeling alone
  • Preparing for death in the later stages of life
  • Death-defying culture versus befriending death

Resources mentioned in this episode

  • Stephen Jenkinson

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website. 

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page.

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

Support this Podcast

To support this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe to, or follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

Remember to keep breathing, I promise, it will get easier.

Nathalie with Brooke Carlock on If This Wasn’t Enough Already | Episode 22

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Brooke Carlock

Today on the podcast I’m speaking with Brooke whose story could be one that movies are made of. She has experienced loss after loss culminating in a series of devastating and traumatic losses within the past 12 months. 

Listening to Brooke telling her life story is both devastating and shocking, at the same time as hope-inspiring in the way she’s living her life after loss with fierce resilience at the same time as grieving. 

She speaks candidly about the dark places she went through while grieving and how she got help when she was suicidal. 

The truth is that there are people like Brooke who have no choice but to live with multiple traumatic losses. The question is: how do we meet them? How do we enable ourselves to hold space for someone and their situation? 

Regarding the people who helped Brooke the most, she says:

I want to be strong, and I want to keep going and find meaning in things. I’m just like a go-go-go person and the most helpful thing for me was people saying: ‘Slow down and breathe. You need to feel this and not rush through it, not ignore it, not medicate it. 

Brooke Carlock

About this week’s guest 

Brooke Carlock has experienced more grief and loss in her lifetime than most. The deaths of her grandparents, sister, cousin, and sister-in-law before she turned 35, along with her extensive coursework in Human Development and Psychology, taught her the power of resilience. However, nothing would prepare her for the devastation to come in her 40s. In a span of four months, Brooke lost her father to an unexpected heart attack, her stepmother to suicide, and her beloved 10-year-old daughter, Libby, in a horrific car accident.

As a teacher and freelance writer, her daughter’s death led Brooke to relentlessly study the fields of grief, loss, trauma, and resilience in order to survive her own experiences. Currently, she is pursuing her Grief Educator certification.  

Brooke is the founder of LiveLikeLibby.org, a nonprofit organization that provides dance scholarships in her daughter’s honor, as well as the creator of Grieving Mommy, where she blogs about her experiences as a grieving mother.

Brooke’s links:

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Loss of her favourite grandfather when Brooke was 10-year-old 
  • Loss of her sister leaving behind young children, and multiple losses in the close family
  • Divorce
  • Most recently her father (heart attack), closely followed by her stepmom (overdose) and dealing with both funeral arrangement
  • News of the terminal illness of her mother
  • Loss of her daughter Libby through a car accident
  • Dealing with the dark places in early grief and suicidal thoughts

Resources mentioned in this episode

Links

–> For more information, please visit Nathalie’s website. 

–> Subscribe to the newsletter to receive updates on future episodes here.

–> Join the podcast’s Instagram page.

Thanks for listening to HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA. If you’d like to be updated on future episodes, please subscribe to my newsletter on Nathalie Himmelrich.com

If you need grief support, please contact me for a FREE 30 min discovery session.

HOW TO DEAL WITH GRIEF AND TRAUMA is produced and edited by me, Nathalie Himmelrich. 

Support this Podcast

To support this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe to, or follow the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.

Remember to keep breathing, I promise, it will get easier. 

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    Nathalie Himmelrich

    I accompany people therapeutically as a holistic counsellor and coach.

    I walk alongside people dealing with the challenges presented by life and death.

    I’m also a writer and published author of multiple grief resource books and the founder of the Grieving Parents Support Network.

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