Ep 53: Redefining Grief: A New Perspective and its Impact on Blood Sugar - A chat with Kendal Goosen - Path to Better A1C: Proven Strategies for Blood Sugar Balance, Craving Control + Diabetes Prevention

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Hello there, welcome to the pathto better A1C podcast.
I am your host Jenny Pena. I am a national board certified
health and Wellness coach, diabetes prevention program,
lifestyle coach, and I'd love tocome here every single week
bringing you simple strategies for health and Wellness,
especially for diabetes and energy and cravings and how to

(00:22):
balance your blood sugar. And today I have an amazing
guest and I'm not going to let her introduce herself, but we
are going to talk about grief. But I, I can assure you that
this topic, you're going to start seeing it from a different
light after this podcast episode, Kendall, these share

(00:44):
who you are a little bit about yourself so that the audience
can get to know you a little bit.
Thanks, Janie, and thank you so much for having me.
I am so grateful that you're using your platform to talk
about this. I think that, you know, we're
really starting to really dive into mental health, but one of
the topics we don't talk about enough is still grief.
So I really am happy to be here.My name is Kendall, I'm a

(01:06):
certified Grief Recovery Specialist and I'm the founder
of Healfulness. A lot of my clients come to me
discovering patterns of behaviors that are just not
serving them anymore. Things like procrastination,
perfectionism, mostly self sabotaging behaviors, over
working, overspending over eating, and my work through the
grief recovery method is truly about guiding them back to

(01:29):
building enough safety and trustwithin their bodies to sharpen
their lives with more self trustand more self compassion and
enough safety for more self inquiry.
This isn't just my profession, it's also my lived experience.
I grew up with a lot of emotional neglect and
abandonment, and I spent years in cycles of my own numbing and
escaping, particularly attracting emotionally

(01:50):
unavailable people, enduring a lot of narcissistic abuse,
sabotaging my success, and I have really struggled with food
addiction. So my grief was laid and I had a
lot of family estrangement and divorce and you know, all of the
things. When I discovered the grief
recovery method, I completely transformed my life and went
into a space of radical self acceptance and forgiveness.

(02:13):
And now I help other people navigate their grief.
Wow, that's amazing. That's amazing.
Now, simply because I know that when people hear about grief,
they think about a past of a loved one.
But in simple terms, how would you define grief?
Like even on an extended form, right?
Like not just a grief of again having a loved 1 past.

(02:33):
But I know that there are different ways and different
things that you can grieve. So I would love to get your take
on how would you define that? Absolutely.
And I'm glad that you asked thatbecause when grief came into my
life, I also had just put it down to death and divorce.
And in fact, there are more than40 ways in which we can
experience life in our in our lifetime.

(02:54):
If we had to look at the definition of grief, it is the
normal and natural reaction to loss of any kind.
OK, that's the first definition.So the normal and natural
reaction to loss of any kind. And it is also the conflicting
feelings caused by the end or change in a familiar pattern of
behavior. So if we look at look at loss

(03:15):
through that lens, we could actually see that they are so
many ways we can experience lots.
We can you know, it could be a diagnosis which is a change.
It could be definitely with. Diabetes, I feel like a lot of
people grieve almost like the traditions, right?
Like or the patterns, as you said, like, OK, like I used to
do all of this and it was fine. Or how it is impacting the

(03:38):
family and there could be even abit of resentment sometimes over
the diagnosis itself. But it's interesting.
I'm sorry. Continue.
It is. No, it isn't.
And it's, it's just cutting through a familiar pattern of
behavior and that causes the grief.
It could be anything from estrangement from family,
infidelity, betrayal, childhood trauma, your business failing.

(03:59):
And then there's life's many transitions.
There's becoming a mother, there's becoming an empty
nester, there's retirement, immigration, moving.
That's a change. Aging, the loss of identity,
infertility, miscarriage. So loss is inevitable and it's
part of the human experience. And what we, when we don't
understand it for what it is, wecan't recognize it in ourselves.

(04:22):
So we can accumulate grief over the years.
If you think about it, our griefstarts in childhood.
And the analogy that I always give my clients is if you could
picture yourself with a backpack, OK, the backpack is
your, is a backpack that you have for the rest of your life.
And every loss you experience, granny dies, your pet dies, You
don't get chosen for something at school.

(04:44):
Friendships break. Every single one of that is a
Pebble into the backpack. Your parents get divorced,
that's the boulder. You have your first relationship
and your heart is broken. That's another Pebble in the
backpack. So we accumulate grief as we
become, as we grow into adulthood.
And then we are adults. We've accumulated all this loss

(05:05):
and we are stuck, or we have patterns of behavior that is
just not serving us anymore. And so we've accumulated all
this grief in the backpack, and suddenly the backpack has become
very heavy. Now I know that we talked a
little bit before and we mentioned the stages of grief.
Would you kindly go over them? I mean, I'm familiar with them,

(05:29):
but I will look for the audienceto hear quickly, like the stages
of grief. So it's very this is very
interesting and this was an aha moment in my own recovery.
I just want to give you some background on the stages of
grief. OK, So Elizabeth Kubler Ross was
a Swiss American psychiatrist, Ibelieve.
Yes, she spent a great deal of her career working with the
dying, and she was actually a pioneer in the field of Hospice.

(05:51):
So she wrote a book in 1969, it was called On Death and Dying,
and she wrote that they were five phases very common to
people dealing with their impending mortality.
So we know them as denial, anger, bargaining, depression,
and acceptance. The problem is that a large
number of people overlook that she was writing about grief

(06:12):
strictly from the standpoint of those who are facing their own
death. So we hear it all the time, you
know, these five stages of grief, and these are used by
people trying to describe what agriever experiences after a
loss, whether that be a death ofa loved one or any other
significant emotional loss. Unfortunately, it's not true.

(06:33):
It is not for the griever. It was developed for the person
facing their own death. And what is so interesting about
that is that when we look at it like that, it's becomes
unhelpful. The five stages of grief become
very unhelpful and useless for the griever.
And in a way it is actually freeing because what those five

(06:56):
stages of grief does is it boxesyou into something because you
might not feel those things. And so you feel strange to not
be, you know, moving through thestages.
These stages serve no purpose tothe griever.
They do nothing to help you in your grief recovery.
And why that is so freeing is that if you took away the five
stages of grief, you could feel whatever you wanted to feel.

(07:17):
We can't and think the feelings away.
We have to feel them. We have to work through them and
we have to do it with action. So those stages of grief,
they're not correct. They so outdated.
And what has really helped people through the grief
recovery method is knowing that they can feel whatever they want
to feel. You can feel what you need to

(07:38):
feel and they can. All the feelings can exist at
the same time. There are no stages that you
have to go through. Isn't that amazing?
Yes, it is now. I mean, you did an amazing job
explaining what grief is and going through all of this.
What are some takeaways that youcan give maybe somebody that is

(07:58):
listening is going through that transition and is grieving,
right, like for a change, right?Like, and especially now that
the holidays are coming and all that, Maybe like you were
married and now you're divorced.Maybe you had your kids at home
and now you're an empty nester. Like all these changes and maybe
there are people that for the first time this year, you're

(08:19):
going to spend the holidays without a loved one.
Maybe you had a diagnosis. Like a lot of my clients, they,
they have almost like what is called like diabetes fatigue.
Like there's so much that they need to change and manage and
the emotional toll and the social pressure, right?
Like that. Sometimes they go through as to
should you be eating this or it doesn't matter, just eat a

(08:41):
little bit more. It's just one cookie, right?
Like a lot of my clients go through all of that and a lot of
it is just all the emotions or even the emotions tied to this
is the apple pie that my grandmother always made and now
it spikes my blood sugar. And I may need to reframe that.
What are some things that you can tell the audience if you're

(09:03):
in, in that grieving? And I know that you mentioned to
feel the feelings, maybe something that they can do to
help them process those feelingsand, and really embrace grief
and, and move over to the next stage that they need to go to.
So something that I really want to just tell you before I give
you some, you know, tips and tricks is we fix.

(09:25):
We've understood what grief is. We also need to understand what
unresolved grief is because because that is the feeling that
people are having. They are sitting with unresolved
grief. So we know that the grief is
normal, natural. It's because I've experienced
loss. It's because things have changed
in my life. That is the grief.
What is the unresolved grief? So unresolved grief are things

(09:49):
we wish we'd said or done differently, better or more.
And it's also the unrealized hopes, dreams, and expectations
we had for our life. That is where the feelings are
coming from. It's can't make things
different, it can't be better, it can't be more.
The hopes that I had for myself,the dreams of my life, the

(10:10):
expectations of where I thought I'd be or you know, where I'd be
health wise is not what it is. So it's important to know what
that is as well. And when we understand what
unresolved grief is, we can really start to drop the shame,
the shame of who we are now, theshame of the way we're coping,

(10:30):
the shame of the diagnosis. Those things are really
important. You know, a lot of people come
to me and they sitting in the shame.
And that is where a lot of griefcomes from.
It's from the shame of who they are now.
If we had to look at a couple ofways to survive the holidays, 1

(10:51):
of it would be to give yourself permission to not be festive.
We are not under any obligation to perform joy and I think
that's a huge thing when the holidays are coming up.
It is how do I put on the mask? Do the things that we do at the
holiday time. We don't have to soften things,
we don't have to make it easier for people.

(11:12):
We can keep it simple. And when in doubt, ask yourself
what would feel most supportive for me today?
If you are grieving and you recognize yourself as grieving,
you need to start supporting yourself.
And there's something that's that I just want to say to your
listeners is that we are all grievers, every single one of

(11:33):
us. We have all experienced loss.
We have all experienced change and we cannot compare our losses
because we all experienced griefat 100%.
So it is not useful or helpful to compare our losses from one
to another. Or you know, this happened to
someone else. So you know, my thing is not so,

(11:55):
so big. It is big for you and you are
experiencing it at 100%. So taking time to manage what's
will support you and your nervous system, that's the first
one. Give yourself permission to not
be festive and lean into how youcan support yourself.
OK, what is your needs? The next one is being able to

(12:17):
name the losses. So I'm hoping that once your
listeners have listened to this podcast episode, they will start
being able to name those invisible losses.
So not just the death, not just the divorce, what else is it?
Is it I'm not the person I was before or I'm not the person I
was last year? I'm not in the family that I

(12:40):
hope to be in. My relationship has changed,
I've left my home or I'm grieving the future that I had
imagined. You need to name the.
But you mentioned that because like, I have a six year old with
autism and when I when he first got diagnosed and he's doing
amazing. He's like, he brings me so much

(13:01):
joy. But when he first got diagnosed,
I think I went through a processof grieving, but it was the
grieving of to some extent, so of the dreams or ideas that I
had or things that I would do with my son, right?
That now that he's on the spectrum are different.
But I mean, I had to grieve and cry and feel all the feels the

(13:24):
way that you're saying. But then what I felt that helped
me was to reframe that to be like, well, it doesn't mean that
I cannot have certain experiences with my son is that
now these experience may be different.
And it doesn't have to be like the framing of like we are going

(13:44):
to. And I'll give you 1 very
specific example. My son is very picky.
He's a very picky eater. And I love going on restaurants.
I love going out to eat. I love trying new foods.
I'm very adventurous. I will try foods from all
countries, all ethnic groups. Like I love to travel through
food, let's put it like that. And he is such a picky eater.

(14:08):
We can't go to restaurants together.
So for me, I had to grieve the fact that one thing that I love
doing, I may not be able to do that with him, but then I
rediscover other things that we still bond over and that are not
necessarily what my idea of like, oh, these are the bonding
activities that I'm going to do with my son.

(14:28):
So I know that everything that you're sharing about grieving, I
had to grieve that. And that's just one example, but
there were other things that I had to almost reframe my mind
and see like, well, this is not going to be the way that I
envisioned or imagined, but I don't have to sit on that grief
forever, right? Like I have to process them and

(14:48):
then see like, OK, how can I genuinely find joy?
And it's the same thing with diabetes is the same thing with
exercise. It's like, OK, like you don't
have to. Some people have injuries,
right? And, and maybe they used to walk
outside or run, and now they cannot do it.
And they have to grieve even thefact that they won't be able to
do that anymore. But acknowledging that, as you

(15:09):
said, and then reframing it and saying, OK, but there are other
things that I can do that are going to bring me joy.
Like I don't have to sit on the grief forever, right?
But I love everything that you're just sharing.
So this kind of like resonated with me and I figured I would
share. And what you're saying is so
important because what you did was you recognized it for what

(15:31):
it was. The problem is, is that we
always trying to get through thediscomfort as quickly as
possible, can be always trying to avoid and escape the
feelings. And what you did was you.
You could name the grief I am grieving, the life we could have
had the dreams. Remember what I said?
It's the dreams, the hopes, dreams and expectations of what

(15:53):
it was going to look like. And it starts with that level of
awareness. It's being able to name the
thing because naming the thing loses the intensity.
It's the unnamed grief that feels heavier.
It's the ones that are just swirling in our head and we
never actually giving language to it.
I am grieving. I'm grieving the life that I
wanted for him. I'm grieving the life I wanted

(16:13):
for myself. You know, that's really
important to be able to name it.When we start to name it and we
start giving language to it, we can start to zoom out a little
bit, be create a bit of spaciousness to zoom out and go
hold up. I can also reframe this and I do
have a choice how I'm going to show up to the grief.
We don't really allow ourselves time to do that and that's why
we go into things like food addiction and gambling and

(16:37):
anything to soothe our way through it because we just don't
want to feel. Yeah, yeah.
It's like a numbing is a numbingmechanism, almost like an
avoiding to face and name it andacknowledge and feel it right.
Sometimes a lot of people say keep your mind busy.
Don't think about it right. Whenever you're going through a
difficult situation, just keep your mind focused on other

(17:01):
things versus actually processing what is happening.
But it's amazing. OK, My God, so much good
information, Kendall. I love this.
Now I I'm going to have a few like random questions.
So what is like your favorite activity that brings you joy?
Being with my family, being withmy family honestly is just a

(17:22):
safe space for me. I, I had AI had my daughter.
She's going to be 3 in January. So we're very sleep deprived of
this house, but I had her. I had her in 2023, and my
journey through my, you know, doing my own inner work and my
healing had already started. I had already been, you know,

(17:43):
catching myself and catching myself and patterns of behavior
very much stuck in the shame of who I was.
And, you know, why is this me? And why am I stuck with these
problems? And I had a lot of awareness on
it, but it wasn't until my daughter was born that she
really forced me, right? She forced me to look at myself
and the work on healing and the grief recovery and all those

(18:06):
types of things happened becauseshe was born.
And so being a mother really keeps me accountable to my
healing. And then just lie for the
toddler. You know, every time I leave my
desk at the end of the day and Igo inside, it's just immersing
myself into her world. And so I go from this day of
talking about grief and all the heaviness of grief.
And then I go into my house and we are, you know, playing on a

(18:29):
bus and seeing animals in our living room.
And so that for me just populates my nervous system.
I feel peace really brings me happiness.
Awesome, awesome coffee or tea. I recently stopped drinking
coffee. I've always loved tea.
My husband and I are major tea drinkers.
Recently I was diagnosed with ADHD and I have made a number of

(18:54):
adjustments in my life and I actually had found that as I was
drinking coffee. I normally drink 1 cup of coffee
a day which is pretty good and Iused to drink it in the morning
and I would find I would crash at about 11.
And since I've stopped drinking coffee and I've simplified my
life and moved back from 2 screens to 1 screen and you know

(19:15):
all the things. I'm much more of a tea drinker
now. Favorite song when you're
feeling a little bit down? Favorite song?
I love music. I think my favorite song is
anything by Coldplay. But I also love oldies, so I
love Fleetwood Mac. I'm a major Fleetwood Mac fan
and Sweet little lies that always is.

(19:36):
Just like my karaoke song. It's my thing.
I love that song. My husband and I sing it all the
time. Awesome, Awesome.
OK, awesome. Well, Kendall, I know that we
could talk here forever and everand ever, but now as we
conclude, I would love for you to share.
Obviously, I'm going to put all the information on the show
notes, but I have two requests for you.

(19:57):
One, to give this one last tip or strategy for the audience
just to navigate the holidays, regardless of the type of grief
that they're going to. And also if you could share
where they can find you, where they can connect with you.
OK, so my tips for the holidays is prepare for emotional

(20:17):
ambushes. Holidays are full of triggers,
songs, smells, photos, routines.Instead of trying to avoid them,
try anticipating them. OK, that's my first one.
The next one is lower the emotional labor that you carry.
So grief makes concentration hard.
It makes decision making hard. It makes showing up hard.
So if it's possible, simplify. Fewer gifts, fewer events,

(20:42):
simpler meals, lower expectations.
And my third one is make room for mixed emotions.
Grief isn't always sadness. It's not always depression.
You may laugh and you can cry within minutes.
You may feel grateful and gutted.
Holiday grief is really one emotion.
So let it all, let all of it belong.

(21:03):
Let it be. Where they can find you,
Kendall. So I am really active in my DMS
on Instagram. I have a lot of people reaching
out there and I love having conversations there.
So the best place to find me is on Instagram.
My handle is at Heel fullness.coand you could also e-mail me.
That's Kendall at heel Fullness dot Co.

(21:23):
I love chatting to people. I love when they open up to me
and they can tell me because like I said, we are all grievers
and your story is my story. We all have different losses,
but the golden thread is the grief.
It's familiar to all of us. Absolutely, absolutely.
And I am going to remind you that the holidays, I know that
all the changes in strategy, allthis changes in schedule, the

(21:46):
changes in like OK, all these things that are happening or the
busyness, I do have an amazing resource.
It's called in a solved if you want to get like simple dinners
that are blood sugar balancing. The link is going to be in the
show notes, but you can go to subscribe page dot IO forward
slash dinner and you're going tobe able to grab it from there.

(22:07):
But Kendall, thank you so much for everything that you shared.
I am sure that everybody has lots of takeaways and hopefully
they can see grief in a different way and they're able
to, instead of hiding those emotions that actually impact
your blood sugar by the way, youcan process them and release
them and then shift your mindsetand move into things that bring

(22:31):
you that balance and that joy and you're able to process loss
and grief in a different way. So thank you so much for
joining. Thank you so much, Kendall.
And as always, I will be here every single week with simple
strategies for health and Wellness, for blood sugar
balancing, and for a healthy andhappier life.
Have an amazing holiday and takecare until the next one.

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Ep 53: Redefining Grief: A New Perspective and its Impact on Blood Sugar - A chat with Kendal Goosen

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