Today, I’m doing something a little different than I have done before. While many listeners are likely familiar with my story and my work, I’m aware that maybe you don’t! So, today I thought that I would “introduce” myself to you in case you’ve been wondering what happens beyond the podcast or how I came to do this work.
Fourteen years ago, I lost my thirty-five-year-old husband to cancer, leaving me with two young girls to raise. I felt lost, frustrated, and alienated by our culture’s outdated “time heals all wounds” approach to grieving. As I’ve described many times in my weekly newsletter and in my first book, Second Firsts, I felt like an alien on earth. I felt like I no longer belonged here and nothing made sense.
I realized that even my training as a grief counselor had not prepared me for what I was feeling and experiencing. I felt like I had also died that day and had to find a way to create a whole new life, and the model for grief that I’d been taught didn't explain that or show me the way out. So, I set out to understand what I was experiencing and the Life Reentry® Model is the outcome of that search.
I hope you’ll listen to this episode where I walk you through how, and why I created The Life Reentry® Model through which I have led thousands of people through. I myself practice the principles of Life Reentry daily. It’s more than just a class or theory, it’s a way of seeing and living your life. It was fun to remember the early days of these classes and how we were one of the first using Zoom, well before we all became very familiar with it this past year!
“There is no going back to the person you were before loss. There is only going forward. Being stuck in the in-between, in the Waiting Room, is where we suffer, play small, and repeat old patterns and behaviors that keep us just surviving instead of thriving in our new life. Many people spend years in the Waiting Room, thinking that this is their new life.” ~ Christina Rasmussen
Life Reentry begins with a person stuck between two worlds. This is a place we call The Waiting Room—a psychological space one retreats to after great loss. It is a gap between lives—the life that has been forced into the past by grief and loss, and the new life that has yet to begin. The Waiting Room is not a physical place, but rather a mindset. It’s a holding pattern—safe, comfortable, but inhibitory. It keeps us out of danger, but also out of our life.
After spending the last ten years teaching and educating hundreds of thousands of bereaved people through classes, workshops, and my two books, I made the discovery that it wasn’t the traditional loss of death that kept the bereaved and non-bereaved people in a repetitive cycle of grief, but the invisible, non-validated and untold losses from the earlier chapters of their lives.
I call these Invisible Losses. What I uncovered through my time with people was the multitude of Invisible Losses that kept pulling people back into, and staying stuck in the Waiting Room.
I discovered an undercover world of grief. What plagued my class participants and emotionally imprisoned them long term more than anything was these invisible, mistakenly perceived smaller experiences that are not traditionally considered significant. These are the losses that society fails to recognize, mirror back, or validate.
When everything looks the same on the outside, yet everything has changed on the inside, we break. We break in half. This is the duality of loss. In this short episode, I explain in more detail what Invisible Loss means and what they look like in our everyday lives (there are multitudes).
My mission is to bring forth a new way of speaking about and embracing loss and also to help our communities understand that living after loss is equally important as grieving.
If you are feeling stuck in a place between the life you left behind and the life you so wish you can have…
If you feel stuck in the Waiting Room but don’t quite know why...
If you have gone through something difficult, invisible, untraditional, or a big loss and have struggled to find your way back...
If you feel like you should be farther along in processing your grief but just can’t seem to move through it...
If you are ready to look at your life, behaviors, and patterns and create a new life and way of being…
I’d like to invite you to join me for my next Life Reentry for Invisible Losses course. Registration is now open for this in-depth and life-changing 8-week online experience. We begin on Tuesday, March 30th. You can find out more information and register HERE.
Things I Mention In This Episode
- Save your spot in the next Life Reentry Class beginning March 30th HERE.
- Sign up for the Second Firsts Message in a Bottle HERE.
- Book: Second Firsts by Christina Rasmussen
- Book: Where Did You Go? by Christina Rasmussen
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