Nancy: Welcome back to the Nancy Levin Show. I am so honored today to be here with my very dear friend, David Kessler. So for any of you who may not know, David is one of the world’s foremost experts on grief and loss. And he is the author of six books, including his latest, Finding Meaning. The Work Book, and we will be talking all about that today.
One of the things I want you to know is how dear David is to me, how our friendship continues to fuel me and how his deep sense of compassion and understanding makes him a gift for us all.
There’s something I want to share with you about David because he came to the work of grief and lost honestly, through his own personal experience as a child, witnessing a mass shooting while his mother was dying in the hospital. And this was really a foundational point for him. And he has shared his wisdom, his heart, to help so many of us through our grief. And despite his vast knowledge and experience of grief, his life was turned upside down when his own son at 21, suddenly died. And so David comes to his work as an expert in grief, as a practitioner of grief and loss as well.
And he’s here today to share with us about his new grief workbook. And I’m really grateful for my friendship with David. And I’m grateful to bring him here to you because, I suppose, you know, one of the things I often will say: if you think your book is for everyone, it’s for no one.
And yet, David, I would say over and over again, all of your work is for everyone because the truth is we are all going to experience grief and loss in our lives. And so I welcome you here today.
David: Thank you, Nancy. Thank you so much. it’s interesting. I think of our old friend, Louise, and paying attention to what we say and what we think. And when you started talking, I almost went: stop! You’re going to make me cry. And then instead I went, just be touched by what Nancy says, just be touched by the love. So thank you, Nancy. Thank you so much.
And I want to say right at the top for anyone who’s listening, going, Oh, but I’m not in grief. No one’s died. Grief is always the death of something. Maybe the death of that romantic relationship, the death of the friendship, the death of the job. It’s always the death. Grief is always a change we didn’t want. And so, I want to just keep people really open to all these changes and even things. I think people don’t think about that.
There was the death, maybe of your innocence in your childhood because of abuse. Yeah, maybe there was grief because of so many losses, abandonment, things like that. The interesting thing is, and I’ve been talking about this, there’s one death we can bring ourselves back from. And anyone who’s been in a relationship with a narcissist, that is often the death of oneself.
And you have to find yourself again and grieve that.
Nancy: I really appreciate you sharing that because I know that when I was going through my divorce, I certainly felt grief around that. Grief around a plan I thought I was living that changed and then something I know that you and I have talked a lot about, which I feel really in the heart of exploring right now is not only compounding grief.
So if grief is alive in the moment, it tracks back to previous griefs. Like for me, everything will track back to my brother dying always. And then sort of at the other end of the spectrum, anticipatory grief, the grief I’m expecting to feel right now, specifically around my parents and their aging and their health. And so I feel like I’m always in this relationship with grief, whether it’s past grief compounding or future grief, not here yet.
It’s so true. It’s fascinating to me. And it’s one of the hopes that I have for this book to help people get in touch with so much of that. I was just in New York and there’s someone I wanted to see. I knew they were in the middle of a big project of their own. They were busy. And I got to tell you, I was ruminating about it and I was on it in an unhealthy way. Nancy. “I’ve come all the way to New York—you can’t find 10 minutes.” And they better not have posted about anything because I’m like, really and the interesting thing is, I was on my way to a relationship retreat to speak and I was like. You have got to attend to this before you speak to these folks. You’ve got to show up, like, practicing what you’re preaching.
And I kept going, what’s this about? What’s this about? Why is this person being busy? Why is it driving me so crazy? Well, finally, it hit me like, he just wasn’t there for me. And I went, oh, wow. He wasn’t there for me. Oh, can I find that in my past? Then all the abandonment opened up. Of course, there’s all those wounds just asking for another layer of healing.
And the goal is to really be aware of that work through that so that I can get to a place. And interestingly enough, once I got to that. The person said, “Oh, by the way, but I’m going to be in LA in a week.”
Nancy: I so appreciate you sharing this. So many things are coming up. First is, you know, there’s that expression when we’re hysterical, it’s historical.
David: I think it’s a judgmental saying just because, oh, you’re hysterical. And I think it’s really about when the emotions and. It’s hysterical your historical says it’s so well, but ideally what it really means.
It’s our reactions and our emotions aren’t right size for the situation. My friend was busy. Period that was all that was. I brought so much more to it. And whenever, like you said, there’s this heightened intensity. What a clue that is that we’re dealing with all losses.
Nancy: What’s happening is we bring our meaning making machine to everything. Everything means something about us is what’s really happening. So, of course his unavailability, it wasn’t about him. It was about what are, what are, what are you making this mean about you that he’s unavailable to you?
And then what does it track back to? And we can then look back and connect all the dots.
David: And what I really hope to do with this workbook is just—put a question mark in there! I hear that story of how: dare they not be available for me. Can you just put a question mark in there? Could there be other stories? Could there be other stories? Like, if we just played with reframing that.
I was raised with unhealthy people. My father, I remember him ripping the cabinets off our kitchen once when I was trying to get away from him with his rage. My mother was bipolar. We would diagnose her as that now, and I’ll tell you I hold them dear in my heart because they are dear wounded people and that colored so many things. And so, when I can just find options for other stories, which is what I didn’t get in my childhood, I only had victimhood, right? So, if I can just open it up to the other stories, and I’m not even say discount that one or change it.
Be open to other possibilities that maybe there’s many meanings. Maybe there’s many stories. And Nancy, I think the workbook gently helps walk people through all that. There’s such a wonderful exercise about reframing our stories, how our stories, not just the bad ones, but the good ones.
Nancy: And that’s such an important point, because I think so many of us are quick to override the good to default to the negative. Science has proven we have a negativity bias in our brain. It is our default. So the invitation needs to be consistently there for us to go and look for the positive.
David: And those stories have been so ingrained in our neurons that it’s, it’s actually challenging to cut a different pathway and to really look at, what if it’s not because of me? What if it just happened? Someone’s just busy, things happen. And can I begin to reframe that? Because one of the things in the workbook I talk about just the death of things, whether it’s the death of the relationships or loved one. And if we can just begin to understand how often we make decisions from our abandonment. How we create the next relationship. I mean, how many of us sit down and interview someone at dinner based on what went wrong in their old relationship, which is really, I’m going to chat with you about, are you going to hurt me that way too?
Nancy: So two things that are coming to mind. One is, so this beautiful workbook. Shall I say it’s a companion to finding meaning? How do you want to talk about that?
David: It’s a companion book, but you can start right with the workbook. Right? That’s what I wanted to say. You can go right to the workbook. Iit’s got the theories, but it’s got places for us to really tease out these thoughts, these beliefs that are holding us back.
Nancy: And that’s what I love. I love interaction. I love experiential. And that is how I find this work, this workbook to be. And What I got curious about as I was moving through the book, the workbook is: why do you think it took you so long to create a workbook, a grief workbook? You’ve been at this for so long, decades, and you’ve written so many books. Why do you think now is the time for the workbook?
David: Oh, God, Nancy, I’m always so honest with you.
The idea of a workbook has come up before. There have been two people in my life, one person in the literary world and one other person in my life, and both of them shared something along the lines of – you’re a serious writer. You don’t do a workbook. It will actually hurt your literary career. And, you know, thank goodness, I’ve arrived at the age and the wisdom where I go, am I committed to my ego or am I committed to helping people? And I am committed to helping people. If I want anything, I want to go to sleep at night thinking I’ve done something to help people.
Nancy: As always, appreciate your, your truth, your honesty and right. And the thing is that this workbook really is an invitation to roll up our sleeves, to step in, to really examine ourselves, ourselves. To bring the self inquiry to experience self discovery. I love this workbook. I mean it. And I, you know, I have myself just recently published two journals, which really are workbooks.
Hay House didn’t want to call them workbooks, but they really are. And I love the roll up your sleeves approach and invitation to be able to actually dive in and get to the bottom of something with myself.
David: And you’re one of those people in my life that like as I was contemplating that and knowing in my heart I wanted to do this. I was like: Nancy does this she’s got an amazing career she’s a well loved and respected like You know, there’s just something crazy about it and i’m so glad I moved to the other side.
Nancy: Me too! And and I actually just want to highlight something that we were talking about just before we hit record. So The Grief Workbook that we are talking about, tell everyone where to find it because we have discovered there are some copycats out there.
David: This is our new age of AI. Currently, when a book is successful, like finding meaning, they will use AI to just think about it. Come up with an instant workbook. Look, Nancy, if someone had written a workbook and I opened it up and it was amazing, it’d be one thing. But there’s question in the AI books that like, aren’t even about grief, right?
Like, wait did it latch onto something else? And so I wanna make sure people get to the right place. We have a site set up called griefbook.com, and from there you can get to the Amazon link, the Barnes and Noble link. The independent bookstore, and it shows you what the book looks like. It is the book that has the full teal cover. Accept no imitations!
Nancy: Except no imitations. Of course, imitation is a form of flattery! And like you were saying before, we’re supposed to take this as a good sign that the book is being copycatted.
David: I want people to get to the one that I know is going to help them.
Nancy: Correct. So griefbook.com.
David: And by the way, if they go there, get the book now, they’re also going to get a free three-part class with me. So, we’ll do a little of the book together.
Nancy: I love that you’re doing that. That’s really cool. So everyone listening, if you are listening to this right now in real time, as this drops, you’ve got an awesome opportunity when you order, the new book, which is Finding Meaning: The Workbook, you are also going to get a three part, workshop with him. That’s fabulous. Great.
David: The other thing that’s interesting is, I often say to people, you know, to post something about grief, and it can be about this book. I would love that, but it could also just be any kind of grief quote. There’s a million of them on my Instagram and Facebook. But people always say to me, I don’t know anyone in grief. And I go, you don’t know anyone who’s going through a breakup, a divorce, a betrayal, dealing with their past, dealing with old wounds. Has a loved one died? And they’re like, no, not really. And I go, I dare you to post, but when you see who in your life has it, so people could post grief book.com and they’re going to see who in their life is in grief that they didn’t know about?
Nancy: I fully wholeheartedly agree with this concept that you’re sharing here because I think we are every day grieving something and the thing about there’s something about grief that is that to me and this is sort of like just coming to me in this moment You know, we talk about trauma like big t little t trauma. I think grief is not that different I think there’s like big G grief and little g grief or big L loss, little l loss. And it’s not even about, it’s the size isn’t even about the impact. It’s just the way that we tend to relate to my, well, my grief isn’t as bad as yours. So I shouldn’t count it.
David: That’s one of the big questions I get all the time. Which is the worst grief? A loved one dying? Is it a child? Is it a murder? Is it divorce where they’re on the planet rejecting you every single day still? Is it a horrible betrayal that you’ve lost your trust?
And I always say, the worst grief is yours. It’s your grief. Forget everyone else’s grief in comparison. When we’re in comparison, we’re in our mind, and we don’t have a broken mind. We have a broken heart. That’s where we need to attend to it from.
Nancy: And then once we can have compassion for ourself in that experience, that allows us to expand our compassion to others.
David: Absolutely. You show up differently, but we all have to heal ourselves first. And the fascinating thing about it is so many people don’t realize I had some old losses, or I have a relationship that I’ve gotten over. I put in things in the book, like a reaction checklist. I put in there a disloyalty checklist.
I mean, if you don’t think some of these things are still running your life, go through a couple of those checklists and you’ll go, oh, it’s time to identify this and shift it. But we don’t know that. We didn’t know it. We didn’t know how if we discovered it, how to change it. So that’s what I’m hoping the workbook does.
And you know, the other thing that I just want to say that I loved about doing it. We’ve heard of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. It’s Star Wars. It’s the Hunger Games. It’s any movie you’ve seen. And it’s a, it’s an archetypal old story. And it is about just think about Star Wars. Luke’s parents are killed. You go into the dark night. You refuse all, you know, all of that. We all go into our dark nights. It’s Star Wars of grief and loss. And I put in the book. The Hero’s Journey, did it with Star Wars, and then I invite people to do their own hero’s journey.
I want people to understand horrible things have happened to you. It is brutal. I mean, you know, I think of me between father’s beating, you know, mother’s neglect, sexual abuse, mother dying, a shooting, then my own son died. I mean, I hope to be evidence that no matter what you’ve been through, the relationships that have gone wrong, but I want to be evidence for people that no matter what you’ve been through, there’s still healing and healing does not mean forgetting healing means the event no longer controls us.
And so I try to walk people through to see you are not a victim of your life, even though you may have been severely victimized. You are actually the hero. And it’s actually your story, but the hero’s journeys at the end, because I need to guide people through excavating the pain to get to realizing they are the hero of their story of their story.
Nancy: I’m so I’m really moved by this piece here. It brings me back to thinking about when you were first writing Finding Meaning, and that you had, because of your work with Elizabeth Kubler Ross, you had, you had this new stage of grief. You created this new stage of grief, Finding Meaning, and how that element supported you in the loss of your son, specifically.
David: And I knew meaning was important. I’d read Victor Frankl’s work, Man for Meaning— trying to really connect the dots. I’m so honored the Kubler Ross family gave permission to add a sixth stage to her iconic stages. And I always hear Elizabeth whispering, Tell them the stages aren’t linear, right?
Yes, they’re not linear. And the thing that goes wrong with meaning is people go… meaning? There’s no meaning in a betrayal in a horrible divorce in a death, in an accident in shootings. There’s no meaning in those things. And I’ll go so true. Meaning is not in the horrible event. Meaning is in us. It’s what we do after.
Nancy: Something that’s popping in my mind here, and I’m curious, and I know we’ve spoken about it in other contexts, but the way that you were bringing it up in terms of the hero’s journey element here too. In terms of the stages of grief, in terms of finding meaning, in terms of our own processing. Let’s just talk a little bit about forgiveness.
David: I think one of the biggest things that goes wrong is we try to forgive ourselves for something that was actually not our fault and not in our control. And it doesn’t work and people think they’re doing forgiveness wrong and they don’t realize they’re doing forgiveness on a false guilt on a judgment.
So, I got to tell you, the people I work with who have so much guilt, and they’re trying to forgive themselves. It actually didn’t contribute. I know you think if you would have been in the car with them, they wouldn’t have died. I know you think if you would attended to the kids a little more and been, you know, less mom and sexier wife, they’d still be with you. You know, husband, not so much a workaholic or whatever. I know you think that and you might go to trying to forgive yourself, but it glitches because it’s not the truth.
One of the things I invite people to do is to go through some steps in the workbook on their guilt. And a lot of times they find out it really wasn’t them. It wasn’t them. Now look in 99 percent of the cases someone is like, yes, I picked up the gun and shot them. All right. Yes. Of course. You have to forgive yourself. But just around the piece of that, I just want to say to people if you’ve worked on forgiveness and forgiveness is beautiful and helpful and so important. But if it’s glitching, just consider there might be a possibility you didn’t do anything wrong. And that’s why you’re having a hard time now.
With all that said, oh my gosh, there’s many times we do have to forgive ourselves. And there’s such a human element to life and we don’t give ourselves the grace to be human. You know? Yeah. I mean, okay, look, I was talking to you before the show, I have judgment about how I handled another interview. Can I have grace with myself? In the human experience, I’m probably not going to do every interview well, and isn’t that okay? And who, you know, if I did everything right, I lose something human about this life. And we are here to make mistakes and get it wrong and enjoy the fullness of the good, the bad and everything in between and to realize even good and bad are stories their meanings were making up.
Nancy: I’m like tearing up legitimately and you want to know what it is. I’m having like a moment here where you sharing so honestly and transparently about the truth reminds me of a time when neither one of us would have done that in a public setting. And how powerful, how potent it is to be able to be here revealed. Because I think that really is at the heart of the work.
Whether it’s finding meaning, whether it’s grief and loss, And then I’ll just tie it in with all the shadow work because I think it’s so intertwined. But being willing to look at what’s true instead of what’s the story I’m telling myself because the story I’m telling myself is what causes the suffering. And so not hiding really is where I’m coming at. Like, I just feel, I feel us together in our no longer willing to hide-ness
David: To have compassion for ourselves, for everyone listening, because it didn’t feel safe until this moment. Now I’m going to tear up. It didn’t feel safe. We’re doing therapy, Nancy! If you ever want to know what our calls are like, this is what they’re like.
This is what they’re like! The moment wasn’t safe enough till now. And for anyone listening, if you haven’t been able to be your authentic self, just know it wasn’t safe enough yet. And it might not be safe enough still. But inch by inch, Nancy, you and I have been on a slow reveal. Maybe sometimes it feels like a fast reveal. But it really is. We are so all of us are so raised to be other oriented and to be the pleasers, the hyper vigilance, the aware, the predictors, the protectors of everyone. And we’ve lost ourselves. And then we’re hurt and hurtful. And we’re this, we’re that, and we don’t even know those critical voices in ourselves. It’s not even who we are.
Nancy: I’m really moved. I mean this is really, this is really a sweet moment to feel so deeply. Because I feel like, that might be also part of the time, part of the timing of why the workbook coming out right now is so important. Because where you are in your own process, with your own grief, with your own loss, with your own work, and no longer feeling the need to conceal what you used to and standing in the revealing. This invitation of this workbook is really profound for each one of us so that we can really look at: What is true? What is real? What meaning are we making? And what is the way forward? Because it really ultimately is about, about mobilization and momentum in forward movement.
Davic: And to recognize, if you’re listening, if any of this is resonating, it probably means you’re ready. You’re strong enough. You could open this book and like I said, if people go to griefbook. com, we’re going to do a three-part series together. That’s absolutely a free series that goes along with the book to help you begin this walk to release the old relationships, the childhood wounds, a million losses, a million tears, as they say, that have been inflicted upon all of us.
Nancy: I love you infinitely and appreciate you and I’m grateful for you and I’m just going to urge everyone listening to get your hands on this new workbook griefbook.com. Go there!
Finding Meaning: The Workbook. Get your hands on it. Do the free workshops with David that he’s created in companionship with this workbook and really give yourself the gift of your own undivided attention around grief and loss.
David: And you’re going to see the workbook says the word death, but I want you to translate. You have suffered the death of the child, the death of the relationship. It’s all about all those losses we endure.
Nancy, I love you. And I so appreciate you. And nothing like us crying together publicly in public.
Nancy: I love it. Thank you. Everyone go to griefbook.com and grab the workbook now. I love you David and everyone listening, I’ll be back with you again next week. Thanks everyone. Thank you.