Normalizing Grief and Loss, with Suzanne Jabour

Say YES to Your Soul

Join host Tessa Lynne Alburn and Suzanne Jabour for a deep conversation about loss and rebuilding a life through the lens of curiosity, choice and consciousness.

Suzanne Jabor, a certified grief educator, shares her personal experience with grief and how she found meaning in the loss of her son, Ben, through providing grief education.

Suzanne discusses the challenges of getting through grief, including the emotional and physical symptoms that can arise, the societal expectations and judgments surrounding grief, and the importance of acknowledging and embracing grief in a heart-centered way. Suzanne emphasizes the need for open and compassionate communication about grief, as well as supporting one another through difficult times.

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Check It Out

• Suzanne’s profound experience of grief after the loss of her son, Ben, and how it reshaped her life
• Redefining grief and exploring your own experiences of loss, no matter how big or small
• Understanding the early stages of grief where it can feel like being tossed underwater, struggling to find the surface
• How grief can be triggered by other types of losses
• The cultural taboo around grief and the importance of breaking that taboo by sharing your experiences

About Suzanne Jabour

Suzanne is a grieving mom who has found meaning in her loss through providing grief education – sharing how grief really works and how we can support people experiencing it. She works with organizations and businesses to build the skills and protocols to better support people who are grieving at work.

She is available as a speaker to share her story and help normalize grief as a healthy response to losses big and small. She has a BA and BEd graduate degree in education, and decades of experience as a trainer. She is a certified Grief Educator, Transformational Coach and Workshop Leader.

Suzanne’s Free Gift

Receive Suzanne’s Free E-book - A Lived Experience Workbook

Connect with Suzanne (she/her)

Website: ALivedExperience

One woman’s journey through loving, losing and living

https://linktr.ee/SuzanneJabourGriefEducation

* About the Host *

Tessa Lynne Alburn believes that every woman has the ability to learn to express their true voice, be heard, and fulfill their dreams.

As a Feminine Energy Coach and Soul Connection Mentor for women, Tessa supports you in having the freedom you crave and strong connections with others, as you live powerfully with joy and a sense of adventure.

Tessa’s Free Gift: If you want to be freer, happier and more courageous in life, get your free Soulful Roadmap and Say YES to Your Soul! http://www.tessafreegift.com/

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May You Say YES to Your Soul.

Transcript

Tessa (00:29):

Hello there. Today's guest is a grieving mom, and she's found meaning in her loss through providing grief education to others. Her name is Suzanne Jabour. Suzanne shares how grief really works and how we can support people experiencing grief. She works with organizations and businesses to build skills and protocols to better support people who are going through that process at the office at work. And she's available as a speaker to share her story, to help normalize grief as a healthy response to losses. Begin small. She has a graduate degree in education and decades of experience as a trainer, and she's also a certified grief educator, transformational coach and workshop leader. I wanna welcome you, Suzanne, welcome to Say Yes to your Soul.

Suzanne (01:42):

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Tessa (01:45):

Well, I'm really glad you're here, and you know, you were sharing part of your story with me when we met a couple of weeks ago, and it's just so big. Right? And, and I just wanna say at this point before we jump in, you know, while your story is really big, I recognize also that everyone in my audience may not have that kind of big story or that big of a loss, but that there could be other types of grief in their lives. So I just wanted to bring that into the conversation today. And as you listen, as you listen to Suzanne, I want you to ask, you know, really just say like, or ask yourself, you know, what could be the thing that I'm grieving? What could that be? So whether it's a person or something else. So with that, Suzanne, please feel free to share what you're here to transmit today.

Suzanne (02:44):

Thank you. And I, that's so brilliant that you've set us up that way, because we do have this strange sort of hierarchy of, you know, grief that are kind of worth grieving, you know, losses that are worth grieving. And I did very well on that scale, unfortunately, and it didn't serve me. So I really wanna join you in encouraging listeners to really dig into sort of, where are those losses? Where is the grief? Because if we can face it and we can embrace it, you know, there's so much richness there. There's so much ability to connect with ourselves, with others, with the universe, and, you know, really dig into the depth of who we're here to be and the depth of really what this life is about for us. So, as you said, my story is really big. My most recent loss was that of my son, Ben.

(03:38):

He was 22 and died in September of 2020. So it's just passed three years. And that, as you might expect, was the kind of loss, the kind of rupture in my life that really left me feeling like I was living in a post-apocalyptic nightmare. You know, I could barely get through the day. I didn't know enough about grief for my own healthy grieving. And certainly the people around me, for whatever reason, weren't able to show up the way that I believed they wanted to. And that certainly, I expected them to in some ways. And that's where my curiosity has led me to this place of really talking about grief and the symptoms and how it works and what really happens. Because for me, it meant that, you know, I was very clear almost immediately that the person I had been before Ben died no longer existed.

(04:36):

It was that level of a rupture. And so how did I then rebuild my life, rebuild myself, you know, what choices could I make every day, every moment to for sure, at the beginning. And if you've encountered this and you're way back, you know, for me it's way back. Thank goodness, you know, in those early, early days of a big loss where you just don't even know which way is up, right? The best analogies I can make are all water. They're all water metaphors. And that beginning phase for me really felt like I was underwater being tossed around. I didn't know which way was the surface. I couldn't breathe. I didn't understand how the rest of the world appeared to just be continuing on like normal , right? When, as I said, I was living in this post-apocalyptic nightmare with pieces of me literally in pieces on the ground.

(05:31):

And I think when we start to really be aware of where we've experienced grief in our life, where we've had losses that have brought that emotional, you know, soup, that is grief, it is the loss of loved ones, for sure. It's a death. Absolutely. We understand that there should be grief there. We're not very good at it as a collective. We're not very good at supporting each other. We're not very good at, you know, doing it ourselves for the most part, because we don't have enough information, we don't have enough knowledge, we don't share enough with each other, which is really the biggest way that we learn, is in sharing with each other. So when we have something like grief, that's a taboo topic, we're not sharing enough for us to feel, you know, capable as we go through it. So instead, we feel shattered into pieces and like, nobody understands what's happening to us. And like, what's happening to us is new, when really what's happening to us has happened to many other people. But as a culture, we don't share that. So when we look at the places where we have losses, it can be the loss of a relationship. It could be the loss of an expectation, the loss of a job, the loss of pets for sure need to be on that list.

Tessa (06:44):

Absolutely.

Suzanne (06:45):

The loss of, you know, some way that we thought our life was gonna go, that then it becomes clear that's not gonna happen for whatever reason. And sometimes even change for the better. You know, we're so conditioned to focus on, this is so great, this is so great, this is so great. But every change brings loss and even change for the better still brings loss. And if we can look at that loss and feel into where the grief is, where are the emotions that are attached to that loss? And what messages are they bringing us? I mean, mine were, you know, all kinds of overwhelm. They were overwhelming at the beginning, and I knew that as a matter of survival, I had to stay conscious to them. I got a download in the very early days that as a matter of survival, I had to stay conscious and curious. Yeah so for me, a download is something that just comes, you know, from wherever, whatever your belief system is. For me, it's the universe. And it just drops in as an instant knowing. So you don't kind of have to go through the process of thinking something and then believing it and then knowing it. It drops in as an instant knowing. So that for me, is a sign that like, it's coming from something outside of me, and I should probably pay attention . It's probably some kind of big deal message that I should listen to. So.

(08:33):

Yeah, it dropped in and I just had this knowing that I needed to be conscious and curious. So conscious was about upending the norm of ignoring emotions, of stuffing them in our backpack and pretending that's okay of, you know, pretending at all. I had no ability to pretend. So all those roles that we kind of play, all those masks that we wear, for me, they were instantly gone. I was full on in survival mode. And I remember saying to my daughter in the very early days, my daughter's older than Ben, she was 25 when he died. And I remember saying to her, you know what, everyone who's involved, like our extended family is all grownups, and I'm gonna be responsible for myself first, and then I'm absolutely here a hundred percent for you. And we're gonna figure this out together. And everybody else is just gonna have to adult.

(09:24):

Like, I can't be the one who holds everybody else together. I can't be any of those things that I had been for a long time. And of course that then causes disruption for everyone else's lives. But I couldn't navigate any of that. I had to be really self-aware and self-compassionate as a matter of survival. So that's what the conscious piece was. The curious piece really was how in the depths of despair do I stay in that kind of growth mindset, and not in a way that feels like push energy or like I'm denying anything in order to just like grow, grow, grow. That wasn't the idea or the intention or the message, but it was that, you know, things happen to us and when they happen, we have to make choices about what we do next, how we respond. And I was very clear that my story was not going to be the sort of the story society tells you about a bereaved parent, which is that they are never the same again.

(10:25):

Which of course, I will never be the same again. But I wasn't prepared to buy into the subtext that all that remained was somehow dysfunction and despair. Right? That was not gonna be my story. That I just remained curled up in a ball on the sofa, which is where I spent a lot of time in those early days. But it was about, you know, what choice do I make every day? Small choices, small decisions, baby steps, because I knew that I needed to keep living. And I was very clear that there was a life here to be lived, and it was mine. And so, how did I do that in a way that honors Ben, that honored my daughter and modeled for her what was possible? And really then the curiosity expanded to, you know, why does grief work this way? How are we so disconnected in a time when what we all crave is connection?

(11:21):

Right? The people who wanted to support me, who were held back by fear, wanted to feel connected to me as much as I wanted to feel connected with them. But our culture and our societal norms aren't set up that way. So then the curiosity became about how do I disrupt that? How do I, with everybody who's listening with everybody who has any interest in this topic, you know, how do we co-create a new paradigm where we talk about grief openly, we acknowledge losses big and small openly, where we're not all performing, where the whole of the human experience is welcome, and that we understand when we feel that fear, we need to acknowledge it and instead lean into love.

Tessa (12:07):

Yes. So in your experience, and as you were asking these questions, it sounds like not only were you talking about culture, but you were also picking up on things around specific people's stories, right? Clearly you have some thoughts about that. Like some of the rules, let's say, the unspoken rules that people that they adhere to. Did you also find, I'm curious if you found that for different individuals that there were differentiators?

Suzanne (