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Nathalie Himmelrich

Inspiring Hope | Finding healthy ways of Grieving | Writer

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grief

Nathalie with Kellie Sipos on Drug Abuse and Multiple Losses | Episode 6

August 1, 2022 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

Today I speak with Kellie Sipos who I met as part of being a guest on her podcast, My Child Left Home for Heaven. Kellie has experienced multiple losses within her own family which started with her father’s suicide, followed by the sudden unexpected loss of her sister. In 2018 she lost her daughter Emilie through an accidental drug overdose after which Kellie candidly shares how she herself abused drugs to manage her own grief. Just a few months ago, her mother, who she cared for the last few months of her life, died too. 

‘Emilie’s grief was so on the top of my heart every single day until I lost my mom. Now it’s like the grief of my mom is shadowing over top of the grief of Emilie, and I feel really guilty. I feel like I’m not grieving her appropriately. And then I realized: No, I’m just healing. I’m starting to move on from some of that. And yes, the grief with my mom is newer but that in time will be the same way. I think maybe having to go through it again somehow helped me get over that big hurdle of Emilie.’

Kellie Sipos

About this week’s guest 

Kellie Sipos is the mother of 4 daughters who tragically lost her oldest, Emilie to an accidental drug overdose on July 22, 2018.  Since this time Kellie has tried to stay focused on making a difference in this world. Working with children and young adults with Special Needs as a therapeutic riding instructor and an equine specialist. Mental health has always been her focus but since the loss of her child she is on a new mission, starting her podcast My Child Left Home for Heaven. Being an avid podcast listener she quickly found there were not a lot of podcasts on child loss from the Moms perspective. Kellie is also the state administrator for Drug Overdose Awareness and Moms Against Drugs as well as sharing her daughter’s story in the public school system to help bring awareness to the dangers of drug use. Keeping busy, speaking out and transparency in her grief have helped her to keep the joy in her life after child loss.

Topics discussed in this episode

  • The recent loss of her mother
  • Emilie, her drug addiction leading to her accidental drug overdose which killed her
  • Kellie’s granddaughter being taken away by her father after Emilie’s death
  • Drug addiction and abuse within the family and in the process of dealing with grief
  • PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) following the traumatic loss of Emilie
  • Suicide of her father, the sudden death of her sister
  • Post loss guilt and regrets
  • Compassion fatigue for therapists

Resources mentioned in this episode

  • Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple by Nathalie Himmelrich
  • Shattered by Gary Roe 

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. 

Filed Under: podcast, child loss, emotions/feelings, grief support, grief/loss, grieving parents, health, loss of parent, parenting, trauma Tagged With: child loss, drug abuse, drug overdose, grief, grief and loss, grief support, grieving a child, grieving a parent, grieving parents, relationship, suicide

Nathalie with Domenique Rice on Unapologetically Grieving Out Loud | Episode 5

July 25, 2022 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

Today I speak with Domenique Rice who I have come to know as part of the Instagram community of bereaved parents supporting one another in the Grieving Parents Support Network. People come and go in this community, but Domenique has stayed actively involved and developed a voice to be noticed creating stillbirth awareness in honour of her son TJ.

‘I need to parent my son and honour where I’m at. So that’s the evolution, once again of the ‘stillbirth-Mama-fighting-for light’ and how I really transitioned my grief in my reality to be unapologetic and I say that quite often: unapologetic grief. It has taken me time, but I can’t sugar-coat once again my reality. I can’t water myself down.’

Domenique Rice

About this week’s guest 

Domenique Rice wears many hats – staunch activist, laid-back California transplant, savvy Brooklyn girl, superstar salesperson – but her most important role is that of (bereaved) mother of five. Domenique never had any reason to suspect that something was amiss in her second pregnancy, at least, not until it was already too late. Like most parents, stillbirth and preventative measures were never discussed with Domenique, leaving her completely blindsided when at 36.5 weeks pregnant she unexpectedly went into labor and her second child and first son, TJ, was born still.

In between her morning “TJ coffee” where she holds space each day for her son, rocking a successful sales career, and loving on TJ’s living siblings, Domenique is passionate about sharing her stillborn son, creating stillbirth and child death awareness, and connecting with other bereaved families to support them in their nontraditional parenthood. Grief is not something that parents should need to hide. Stillbirth affects over 23,000 families each year, and Domenique is not willing to stand by while any of them are silenced for one moment longer. 

Feel free to connect with Domenique on her well-regarded Instagram account, @stillbirthmamafightingforlight, where she is actively breaking down stigma and dropping knowledge to prevent stillbirths from happening.

Topics discussed in this episode

  • The death of her son TJ, Terrance Christopher Rice
  • Unapologetically grieving out loud and the love for TJ
  • How to parent a dead child?
  • Using social media (IG) to talk openly and connect to other like-minded people
  • Differences in grieving between partners and how to support one another

Resources mentioned in this episode

  • PushPregnancy.org
  • Return to Zero Hope
  • Measure the placenta.org
  • Dr Harvey Klimans research (Placential specialist)    

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.

Filed Under: podcast, child loss, creative healing, emotions/feelings, grief support, grief/loss, grieving parents, parenting, trauma Tagged With: child loss, grief, grief and loss, grieving parents, parenting a dead child, relationship, stillbirth

Nathalie with Turiya Hanover on the Loss of Significant Partners in Life | Episode 4

July 18, 2022 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

Turiya Hanover on How To Deal With Grief and Trauma Podcast

Today I speak with Turiya, who – among other losses and traumas – shares the turning point in her life when she lost her then 33-year-old husband Welf von Hannover in 1981. Her relationship with death and the impermanence of physical life significantly changed another time with the loss of her most beloved partner Maja just 6 months ago, where she experienced something, she never had before: 

‘Then one night the message came, and it was: Love Is All. And there was such a strong feeling. Love is the bond that brings us over the bridge and that brings two things into oneness, that overcomes the separation. In this case, the separation is a loss of the physical body. But the heart and the love are there. Love Is All.’ 

Turiya Hanover

Turiya’s story is deeply moving and will encourage you to look for something beyond the physical. 

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 to working with people that is a synthesis of eastern insights, living awareness, and a 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 writing a book about the rising of the feminine and about Death as a friend and the realisation of Impermanence. 

  • Website: https://www.turiyahanover.net/
  • IG: https://www.instagram.com/turiyahanover/
  • FB: https://www.facebook.com/turiyahanover
  • Path Retreats: https://pathretreats.com/
  • Working with People: https://www.workingwithpeopletrainings.com/

Topics discussed in this episode

  • The death of her grandfather when she was 7 years old 
  • The sudden and unexpected death of her husband Welf von Hannover at the age of 33 years old at the Osho Ashram
  • The lacking understanding of shock and trauma in the 80s
  • The fear of death always being present
  • Living in a culture that avoids death and experiences a lack of connection to the formless
  • Osho’s death
  • The death of her partner Maja
  • Grief and loneliness can make one feel orphaned by existence
  • The importance of contact in the face of grief

Resources mentioned in this episode

  • Quote by Carlos Castaneda:
    ‘Death is our eternal companion. It is always to our left, an arm’s length behind us. Death is the only wise adviser that a warrior has. Whenever he feels that everything is going wrong and he’s about to be annihilated, he can turn to his death and ask if that is so. His death will tell him that he is wrong, that nothing really matters outside its touch. His death will tell him, I haven’t touched you yet.’
  • A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as if It Were Your Last by Stephen Levine

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.

Filed Under: podcast, emotions/feelings, grief support, grief/loss, self development/motivation, spirituality, trauma Tagged With: grief, grief and loss, loss of partner, osho, path of love, path retreats, rafia morgan, somatic experiencing, traumatic loss, turiya hanover, welf von hannover, widow, working with people

Nathalie with Melo Garcia on Compound Grief and Finding Someone Who Speaks Grief | Episode 3

July 11, 2022 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

Melo Garcia on Compound Grief and Finding Someone Who Speaks Grief

‘When you decide that it is yours, you’ll understand that along with that grief comes an amazing life of living after loss because you have something that no one else can ever, ever have. And that is the love, that is the love – that’s the love that remains.’

Melo has experienced three multiple significant losses in a short time frame. In this interview, she explains how through grief it felt as if she lost her mind and found it again in her journey with grief and trauma.

About this week’s guest

Melo Garcia, a grief specialist, assists those who have lost what isn’t replaceable. She created After Chloe, an online community that provides support, resources, and assistance through the difficult grief journey, in honor of her daughter Chloe who passed away in 2011, and after losing both her parents.

Melo felt it necessary to help others deal with the grief and loss life presents from death, divorce, identity, age, fertility, and empty-nesting by creating various types of solutions that the grieving finds a life worth living.

In 2021 she started the podcast, The Resilience of Grieving, and hosts an annual online Summit during the holidays to provide resources to grievers.

Melo allows you to speak your grief in your way, a way that will assist you and inspire you to live and grieve. Find out more about Melo on After Chloe on Instagram.

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Compound grief: The death of Melo’s father, mother, and baby daughter Chloe in the time span of two years
  • How to deal with therapists who do not speak grief
  • How to understand trauma and how grief and trauma have changed her and shaped her life
  • Self-help through bibliotherapy

Resources mentioned in this episode

  • What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love by Carole Radziwil
  • Which Book?? Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, David Kessler
  • A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles by Marianne Williamson
  • Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple by Nathalie Himmelrich
  • I Had a Miscarriage: A Memoir, a Movement by Jessica Zucker
  • Motherless Mothers: How Losing a Mother Shapes the Parent You Become by Hope Edelman
  • Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself by Melody Beattie
  • The Grief Club: The Secret to Getting Through All Kinds of Change by Melody Beattie

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.

Filed Under: grief/loss, authenticity, child loss, counselling, grief support, grieving parents, podcast, trauma Tagged With: child loss, communication, compound loss, grief, grief and loss, grief support, grieving, grieving a child, grieving parents, relationship

Nathalie with Rachel Tenpenny on Why and How Healing Is Possible | Episode 1

June 27, 2022 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

In this episode, we will be talking about child loss and loss through a divorce. I’m joined by Rachel Tenpenny, who is sharing her experiences and her insight that healing is possible.

I promise that if you will be here listening until the very end, you will know why she is absolutely sure that healing is possible. I’ve known Rachel for many years. In fact, since the first book I’ve written, Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple, where I interviewed her and I still remember the things that she said, which are exceptional.

About this week’s guest

Rachel Tenpenny is a grief expert, emotional well-being specialist, and life-after-loss coach. With over 13 years of experience healing her own heart after her baby daughters died in 2008, she has helped hundreds of people find healing after life’s most painful experiences. Rachel believes grief is not forever and teaches grievers how to heal physically and emotionally with a unique and effective holistic approach to cultivating healing that lasts a lifetime. Originally from a small town in Southern California, she now lives in Northern Virginia with her two boys, Dustin and Colton.

Episode introduction

‘Whether healing is possible or not, is irrelevant. It has to be possible for me because this is the life that I want, and I am not willing to give up.’ 

Rachel Tenpenny gave birth to twin girls Aubrey and Ellie on June 24th, 2008. They both died a few days after their birth. Rachel talks to us about her grieving and healing story and how she came to strongly believe that healing is possible

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Why and how healing is possible
  • A society that does not understand grief and how confused we are about grief 
  • What does it look like when ‘grief isn’t forever’? 
  • We don’t have to be isolated in our grief
  • Debunking grief myths
  • ‘Time heals all wounds’: Time is just time, it is what we choose to do with time
  • Grief skills are life skills and need to be learned

Resources mentioned in this episode

  • Rachel’s website
  • Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple (book)

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. 

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.

Filed Under: podcast, child loss, grief support, grief/loss, grieving parents, separation/divorce Tagged With: child loss, grief, grief and loss, grieving a child, grieving parents, healing is possible, loss

The Right Kind of Grief and Trauma Support

June 20, 2022 By Nathalie Himmelrich Leave a Comment

What is the right kind of grief support and how can I find it? This is the question that each and every one of you reading this will have asked yourself.

hands and coffee on table

Where to find support?

I did too when I was freshly bereaved. Luckily I had a wonderful General Practitioner who referred me to a therapist who I, being a therapist, didn’t have to coach on how to be with me, talk to me, and treat me.

Looking back, she was very supportive and, as I later found out, was also pregnant at the time. I don’t know where I would have been without seeing her and being able to have a sounding board checking on my mental health. She made me feel normal in a situation where I felt as if I was going crazy. She helped me gain perspective and start my journey of dealing with grief before my subsequent and traumatic loss of my mother through suicide.

Am I doing grief ‘right’?

My request for my therapist was to help me gain an understanding of grief and loss. I need to know if I was doing it ‘right’. Even though I understood it from a therapist’s point of view and worked with clients facing grief, I was well aware that going through the experience myself was a completely different pair of shoes.

As a couple, we also went to a grief support group led by the hospital at which I had given birth. This was very helpful for both of us. We got to meet other mothers and fathers, who had also lost a child. We could benefit from listening to their situations and their way of dealing with them.

So how can you find suitable support for yourself?

First of all, you need to decide and find out what it is that you need. The following questions can help you:

  1. Do I need or prefer one on one support or group support or anything else that might support me?
  2. If therapy, do I prefer face-to-face, or am I okay with online therapy?
  3. If therapy, would I be better at seeing a male or a female therapist?
  4. If group support, do I prefer face-to-face or an online group?
  5. If group support, do I want to participate or prefer to be in the background?
  6. If neither therapy nor group supports me, what else supports me? Reading, writing, gardening…?
  7. What would you need to be able to incorporate the support that would be best?

Grief and trauma-informed therapy

If you are looking for a therapist and have experienced loss and or trauma, make absolutely sure that your therapist is grief and trauma-informed. What does that mean? Find out whether they have specific training in grief and trauma. You can either check their website on the about us page or ask them when you talk to them. There are multiple different forms of training for trauma some of the ones that I would recommend are Somatic Experience (SE) developed by Peter Levine and the Neuro Affective Relational Model (NARM) developed by Lawrence Heller. you can find practitioners around the world on their practitioners’ websites.

Finding the right therapist

Like any relationship, the therapist-client relationship needs to feel suitable to you personally. You might like to ask a friend for some recommendations. You could also ask for a referral from your doctor, midwife, nurse, or other healthcare providers.

In both of those situations, you still need to try them out to find out whether the two of you are a good fit.

Find out what the therapist offers in a free introductory session or give them a call and ask for 10 minutes of their time to get to know them. (Book a FREE 30 min introductory session with me here.)

Then make an appointment. When you are there sense how this therapist fits you:

  • Does the therapist’s room make me feel at ease?
  • Do I get a feeling of being supported when I speak to them?
  • Do they listen to me, and do I feel validated and understood?
  • Do I feel at ease being there?
  • Do I feel like making another appointment?
  • Does the therapist ask me about my wishes, aspirations, reasons for therapy, and what I would like to achieve through being here?

These questions should be giving her enough information on whether you want to continue therapy with a specific person or try another one.

Grief group support

There are many different grief support groups out there and through the years of COVID people have become used to meeting online if in-person isn’t possible. On the support page, you can find different suggested groups or you can simply search them yourself based on the specific topic that you need support with, for example, pregnancy loss, child loss, loss through suicide, homicide loss, loss of a grandparent, loss of partner loss of a mother, loss of a father, etc.

Finding the right group

In the same way, as therapists need to fit your needs so does a group. If you like to participate in a group, it is good to choose a group that meets regularly either in person or online. If you prefer to stay in the background, there are grief groups, for example on Facebook, where you can read and comment if you like to.

Make sure that the general theme of the group is a fit for you. I personally have noticed that there are some groups who did not fit with me early on because they were too focused on religion. I needed a group that was filled with hope and showed me the potential for healing and integration.

Overwhelm versus support

Remember: When you are in the early stages of grief, you need support. You might be able to find support among your friends or family members but chances are, they too are to some degree affected and overwhelmed and cannot give you the full support you need. Divide your support needs among different people and providers and don’t overload just any one friend. Talk to a therapist, take part in a support group, message a friend. You might find this article on ‘Circles of Support’ interesting to read.

What you need to be mindful of, is your own feeling of overwhelm: Clients have described to me that certain groups are ‘just too much’ for them, or ‘all the stories of other … losing … triggers me’. Again: You need support, so sense inside yourself to find out what truly supports you. You are also not there to support others – that might come later on. To become a skilled bereaved supporter, you might like to read this book.

Filed Under: grief support, child loss, coaching, counselling, emotions/feelings, from personal experience, grief/loss, grieving parents, health, trauma Tagged With: child loss, finding support, finding the right therapist, grief, the right group, the right therapist, trauma, trauma support, which therapist

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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.

    Copyright © 2012 - 2022 Nathalie Himmelrich