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Healing Grief: Expert Insights with Christy Roberts
How do you find hope in the darkest moments of grief? Can the pain of loss ever truly be transformed into a source of strength?
In this deeply moving episode, grief expert Christy Roberts shares her heart-wrenching journey after the loss of her son, Aaron, and how she turned her personal tragedy into a mission to help others. From the raw depths of pain to discovering the power of self-directed healing, Christy offers listeners invaluable tools for navigating grief, supporting loved ones, and embracing self-compassion.
We explore the stages of grief, from anticipatory loss to mature grief, and tackle the complex emotions tied to suicide loss, including guilt, shame, and the need for forgiveness. Christy's candid insights challenge misconceptions about suicide and illuminate the importance of mental health in reframing grief narratives.
This episode is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and a reminder that no one has to face grief alone.
About Christy Roberts
Christy Roberts is a Life, Results, and Leadership Coach, Speaker, Educator, and the Global Trainer of Self-Directed Healing Practitioners. Awarded the 2023 Alternative Therapy Australian Women’s Small Business Champion, she is the Founder of Creating Change, where she empowers leaders, high achievers, and organizations through personalised coaching and Corporate Wellbeing Workshops.
Christy is passionate about improving emotional awareness and grief literacy, fostering authentic, purposeful, and connected lives while championing workplace culture and psychological safety.
Connect with Christy Roberts
Website: https://christyrobertscoaching.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChristyRobertsCoaching/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc38zhTWCZZNPlFaoBjsxmg
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christyrobertscoaching/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christyrobertscoaching/
About me&my health up & Anthony Hartcher
me&my health up seeks to enhance and enlighten the well-being of others. Host Anthony Hartcher is the CEO of me&my wellness which provides holistic health solutions using food as medicine, combined with a holistic, balanced, lifestyle approach. Anthony holds three bachelor's degrees in Complementary Medicine; Nutrition and Dietetic Medicine; and Chemical Engineering.
Podcast Disclaimer
Any information, advice, opinions or statements within it do not constitute medical, health care or other professional advice, and are provided for general information purposes only. All care is taken in the preparation of the information in this Podcast. [Connected Wellness Pty Ltd] operating under the brand of “me&my health up”..click here for more
I started my coaching journey about 10 years ago, becoming a life coach. And just before COVID hit, like two weeks before, I went full-time into my coaching business. You know, I was living your best life, extraordinary mindset coach, doing all these wonderful things. And then two weeks later, it was the 14th of March, 2020. It was the weekend Melbourne went into lockdown. My 18 year old son was in a car accident. His name's Aaron. Aaron never came home. So Aaron died on scene. And like literally in the blink of an eye, my whole life imploded. And not just personally, but professionally as well.
Anthony Hartcher:That was Christy Roberts and you've landed on the me&my health up podcast. I'm your host, Anthony Hartcher, a clinical nutritionist and lifestyle medicine specialist. The purpose of this podcast is to enhance and enlighten your well-being. And today we're doing that with Christy Roberts, who is a grief expert. We're talking on the subject of grief. In this heartfelt episode of me&my health up, we will delve into the profound journey of healing grief with renowned grief expert, Christy Roberts. Christy is a global self-directed healing practitioner, trainer, a life and leadership coach, and a grief and trauma expert. She brings with her over 30 years of facilitation experience and more than 20 years in human resources, learning and organisational development across various sectors. Christy has been recognised with the numerous awards, including the Australian Woman's Small Business Champion Award in alternative therapy category in 2023. Christy's personal experience with a profound grief, having tragically lost her son in a car accident, deeply informs her compassion approach to helping others navigate their emotional pain. As a founder and creator and creating change, she empowers individuals and leaders to heal their deepest emotional wounds and thrive both personally and professionally. Join us as Christy shares her invaluable insights and practical advice on navigating complex emotions that accompany loss. Whether you're dealing with a recent loss of a loved one or supporting someone through their grief, this episode offers compassionate and guidance and hope for finding peace and resilience. Tune in to this insightful episode of me&my health up. Welcome on the me&my health up podcast. How are you, Christy?
Christy Roberts:I'm awesome. Thank you. And you?
Anthony Hartcher:Oh, fantastic. And really delighted to have you on. We connected and we had a terrific conversation, quite a deep conversation quickly off the bat. And for me, it's on a subject that people often avoid or don't like talking about. It's one of those taboo subjects, and that's on grief. And given that you've got lots of expertise and experience around helping clients through the grief process that you help them through, I think you're going to be a fantastic guest today. So really delighted to have you on the show.
Christy Roberts:Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's such an important conversation and you're right, we don't have enough of these conversations.
Anthony Hartcher:And just before we get really deep into this conversation, I'd really like the listeners to better hear about how you've arrived at what you're doing today.
Christy Roberts:Yeah, I mean, my background is it's organisational development, human resources, leadership development. And I started my coaching journey about 10 years ago, becoming a life coach. And just before COVID hit, like two weeks before, I went full time into my coaching business. You know, I was living your best life, extraordinary mindset coach, doing all these wonderful things. And then two weeks later, it was the 14th of March, 2020. It was the weekend Melbourne went into lockdown. My 18 year old son was in a car accident. His name's Aaron. Aaron never came home. So Aaron died on scene and like literally in the blink of an eye, my whole life imploded. And not just personally, but professionally as well. Because how can you be living your best life and doing all that stuff. But the thing that I learned, I mean, I was a life coach, but I was absolutely blindsided by, and anyone will be in that situation, of course, but absolutely blindsided by the grief and the trauma that I experienced. And within two weeks, I was having heart palpitations, severe chest pain. It was moving into my throat. I had my digestive system literally shut down. I lost five kilos in that first week, and I was eating. I actually thought I was going to die. I was in so much pain physically. And I had done enough work because of the life coaching to know that I knew I needed help, but I also knew I didn't need to go to a doctor because a doctor would just prescribe me medication because that's the medical model of the world that we live in. You know, Australia has the second highest rate in the world for prescribing antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication. It's a real issue that we have. I knew I needed help. And when Aaron died, I was actually working at a festival and I had seen a facilitator. I was supporting her in the workshop space. And she took these people through a healing process, emotional healing. It's called self-directed healing. And it was the only thing I could think of that could support me. So I reached out to her and we did a session. Now, I went into that session with an objective to move the pain off my chest like it was in my throat. I thought I had COVID and I thought I wasn't even going to be able to get to my son's funeral. And within an hour and a half, all that pain, I kid you not, it had gone. Like, all that physical tightness and congestion, it just literally left. And even my speech was thick beforehand. It's very hard to describe the depth of this type of pain, but it was like I was driving through a mountain range in the fog and I couldn't see for the trees in front of me. And then all of a sudden, I could see again and it was clear and I could breathe again. Because one thing with grief is actually really hard to grieve, to breathe. I mean, it just blew me away. Like I literally biologically shifted the chemicals in my body in in one session. So fast forward, I became a practitioner like two weeks later. It was like a lifeline. It gave me hope. It showed me that there was a way to to navigate through with the life coaching skills and everything else that I had. Yeah, it just gave me purpose. It gave me hope. It gave me something to grip onto. I became a practitioner. And then about six months later, I became the global trainer of self-directed healing practitioners. So it was quite a fast trajectory for me because I'd already been facilitating for 30 years, etc. You know, today, since then, I've become a grief educator, trauma-informed, like all the, all the tickets and bells and whistles that you need, and primarily to help myself. Because navigating that depth of loss, I mean, nobody expects their 18-year-old son, healthy, vibrant, fun-loving, to just be gone in such a traumatic and sudden way. And yet that is the reality that I now have to live. And that is the the new life. Neurologically, I have to literally rewire my brain to to go down a different path. And this is a path I don't want. So learning to live with that loss, learning to integrate that pain is my journey and many grievers' journeys that are out there. But one of the core things I learned was how grief-illiterate we are. We suck at grief. We suck at having the conversations. We don't know how to support ourselves. We don't know how to support others. And that's kind of my passion is now through my work, I can honour Aaron through my loss and help many, many other people through this experience. So that's kind of where I sit. And I also help those people, but I do a lot of work in the leadership organisational space as well.
Anthony Hartcher:Yeah, so much to process there, you know, and thinking, what's the best question to ask you next? So, so I was initially thinking, let's have a conversation around what is grief because there's different types of grief. And we had a pre-conversation about this, and I'm really keen for you to share that insight with the listeners. And then the other part to that was obviously you've got this process, which you'll get to and share. But I'm really keen about how to have the conversation. So after you share about, I guess, around that sort of definition around grief and the different types of grief, and then we'll go into that how to have the conversation. Because I've found it awkward myself in terms of having these conversations and often come out with I'm lost for words and those sort of remarks. And, yeah, so I'm one of those people that, you know, struggle with the conversation. So yeah, let's talk about the different types of grief and then we'll move into the conversation.
Christy Roberts:Yeah. Now what is grief? The way that I like to define grief is grief is love. Because if we didn't love, we wouldn't grieve. And the depth of our grief is directly connected with how deeply we love. Because the more we love something or someone and it leaves or goes or is taken away from us, the deeper we will grieve. And so there's so many different types of loss. You know, there's death, of course, and that's the one that most of us think of when we think of grief. But if you think about relationship breakdowns and divorce, if you think about betrayals in relationships, if you think about pet loss, if you think about financial burdens, financial stress, bankruptcies, redundancies, job loss, getting sacked. We have so many natural disasters, people losing their homes, their belongings, things that are very near and dear to them. We can lose around pregnancy. There's a lot of loss that is often really minimalized. Miscarriages, people who have abortions, a number, not all, but some people who have abortions have significant loss and guilt that goes with that. Early infant loss, all sorts.
Anthony Hartcher:The other one I was thinking of, it came up and I was listening to a podcast on it yesterday, was menopause. So the perceptions around menopause, when women are going through menopause, is I've lost my youth. I'm no longer young and attractive. And yes, that's another one I thought of.
Christy Roberts:Exactly. Yeah. And I love that thinking. So it's anything that changes, anything that's was there and it's now not, can be defined as grief. So grief is, I miss you. I wish you were still here. I'm sad that I don't have this anymore. Trauma is a bit different. Trauma is, actually, let me go back a step. All grief has trauma, but not all trauma has grief. Or when a loss is traumatic, it's a little bit different. Grief and trauma are a bit different. So grief, for example, is that I miss you. I'm sad. Whereas trauma is, it's the sudden images. It's the nervous system. It's the flooding. It's the sensations. It's the triggers. It's a little bit different. And what makes a grief traumatic is usually when it's sudden, unexpected, out of the natural order of life. Yes. So that's kind of, I think that's enough on the different types. I mean, we could go on a lot more. You asked about how to have the conversation. Having the conversation, I mean, you've got to be up for the conversation. A lot of people are not up for the conversation because they don't know how to sit with pain. They don't know how to have emotional conversations. And it's perfectly fine, Anthony, to say, I don't know what to say. Because you are witnessing, you're still witnessing. So when it comes to having the conversation, one of the best things that you can say to a griever is, how are you today? How are you feeling today? Because I would get text messages saying, how are you? And my brain would just go into this traumatic, it would just fragment off into pieces. And I'm like, how can I even articulate into a text message how I am? And then I just wouldn't answer because it was too hard. Or I'd be sitting by the fire and, you know, one of my friends says, how are you? And my mind, because when you're in trauma, your mind kind of fragments and it takes time to process. You're like, how am I? Well, I don't know. I don't know. And then there's so much power in the pause. We need to give the conversation space because someone that's in a deep grief, it can actually take time for their fractured mind to even articulate how they are. They need space to be able to do that. So actually slowing it down and giving them time to answer, because we tend to just fill in the conversation, but giving that some space and having having a pause in there can be quite, can be quite useful. And it's fine to say, I don't know what to say. But the how are you feeling today is very important because the how are you feeling? So it's easy for me to say, I'm feeling exhausted. I'm feeling sad. I feel, I feel okay today. Recognising that tomorrow might be different or in a month from now, I might be different. Because if I'm okay today, it doesn't mean I'm going to be okay in a month. And so you're just kind of tapping into that sort of more mindful present moment. How are you feeling today? Best question you can ask a griever.
Anthony Hartcher:And I love how you shared just holding that pause because too often we get so nervous that we think we get nervous with the gaff. We think, oh, they're not saying anything. I need to say something else. And, and often that person doesn't, you're not holding the space for them. And yeah, they feel a bit bulldozed because you're just speaking, speaking, speaking. And as you said, their mind's just fractured. They're just looking to integrate how they're feeling and trying to articulate that to you. So allow that pause. So I think that's a fantastic response to my question there. So the other one that this leads into is like, if you're witnessing someone going through grief, you're checking in with them, asking them how they're going. And sort of, as you said, you froze at times, given given that you're experiencing so much and didn't know how to articulate it, particularly in a text. And so you didn't respond. So that person's probably thinking, oh, maybe she's not okay. And then starts thinking the worst for you. Those stages of grief. So how do you actually know that someone's recovering or not recovering?
Christy Roberts:That's a great question. I know as a griever and speaking to anyone in your community who is grieving, when it comes to all those messages in a big loss, the messages will just come flooding in and it's quite overwhelming. I just want everyone to know that you don't have to reply to every message you receive because grief energetically is really exhausting. And so you just pick your couple people that you talk to and you just put your energy there and you just, like about 24 hours later, I might just go through and just send thank you, love hearts, you know. I just didn't even get into the conversations with everyone. I forgot the question that you asked me. Sorry, I just went off on that tangent then.
Anthony Hartcher:No, it's actually a really good point. I'm glad you actually went on that tangent because I think too often people then feel bad for not responding. And yeah, and so, but as you said, that's appropriate because there's, and I've seen research that says, like there's only really five really powerful or important relationships we can have at any given one point in time. And so really nourish that top five. And it's a bit like a bell curve. There's, you know, some people have slightly more than that and some people have slightly less, but it's a small number. And that's exactly what you said is that those ones that you know that truly care about you, they're the ones that you can you feel that are important enough to respond. And then everyone else, you just feel the love and the support. And so thank you is appropriate enough.
Christy Roberts:Yeah. You reach out to the people who you feel are helping you because, yeah, grief is absolutely exhausting and you need your energy. You need to be able to process. You need to sit with your energy. You need to conserve it to get through your days. So yeah, conserving, it's really important.
Anthony Hartcher:Yeah. So the question was like, how do you know that, it was around the stages of grief, how do you actually know someone is coming out of it or getting worse? Like, what's the stages that someone or the listener should be aware of, that the person's actually progressing through it okay or they're not, they're really not coping?
Christy Roberts:When it comes to the stages of grief, and it's such an important question, is everyone experiences their loss differently and every, every individual grief event is actually different as well. So how you respond in one grief event might be different to it, to another grief event because the relationship that you had is different, where you're at is different. We grow, we evolve. When it comes to stages, there are key stages within grief. First one is anticipatory loss, that is the loss before the loss happens. So say for example, if someone's in a caring role or they've been made redundant and it's three months. So we go into this before stage where we know it's coming. When it comes to death with anticipatory loss, it's often people are still blindsided by it, even though they know that their person is going to pass and they've done every step they can to be as organised and ready for it as possible. It's always going to be too soon and you're not going to be ready. And so it can still be really traumatic for some people, even though they're expecting it. I mean, I work with people like that and they're like, I just can't believe I'm this bad when I had all this time. It's like, no. So there's anticipatory is the loss is the grief before the loss. Acute loss is the stage that you go into when the grief happens and people can stay into that. And I don't like to put timelines because this is different for everyone. It could be a month, it could be two years. You know, people usually are in that sort of acute stage, usually sort of minimum one month, nine months-ish, ish. After that, there's what we call early grief, where we kind of start to stabilise a little bit, kind of start to live again. And early loss, I mean, I still consider myself in many ways to be in early grief, even though it's been four and a half years. But early loss is typically the first couple years. And then what you'll notice is your grief will start to mature. And that's what we call mature grief, where we still have experiences and moments of deep loss or sadness where we sit with it, but it's a lot more mature. There's more of an acceptance around it. So we're not, you know, angry about it, or we're not sort of bargaining or trying to change it or in denial or anything like that. We are moving with it. Now, how do we know if someone is processing through the stages or how do we recognise the signs? The main thing, if you're looking, if you're, if you're the griever and if you're looking at someone or concerned or supporting someone who is grieving, the biggest thing to consider is, is this a healthy expression of my loss? Because we can grieve in healthy and unhealthy ways. And so most people go through a stage in significant loss of the shoulda, the coulda, the woulda, the if only, the what if I had done something different, all the guilt stories. And that's normal and natural in the first 6-12 months, normal and natural, because your mind literally has to rewire and recalibrate. But it's very easy. And most, the majority of the work in the grief space from a professional perspective is working with the guilt and the shame associated with that, because we all come up with stories. So say for me, my guilt stories were, what if I was home, because I was working at a festival, I was away when Aaron died, if I was home, would he have gone out driving at 4am to watch the sunrise? What if I had water in the spa? Because if I had water in the spa, they would have jumped in the spa instead of going out driving, you know, silly things. What if I had bought a different car, would the airbags have deployed for him? Because he'd only had his car for 6 weeks. So he was a, you know, 18 year old pea platter. And so these stories would come in. And for me, and this is going to be different for everyone, but for me, my stories were actually protecting me from accepting the loss, from grieving, because every time I'd go into a grief space, these stories would pop into my mind and they would distract me from actually feeling my loss. And so I, my work was to work with the acceptance, but that's going to be different for different people. So looking out for those stories, are they true? You'll love this being a coach. Is it true? Is it really true? And then you need to ask yourself, is this kind? Does it serve me to feel this way? Is it challenging me to move through my loss? Is it helping me to grow? Because we want to grow. We can grow through the loss. I don't talk about post-traumatic stress. I talk about post-traumatic growth. That's the journey I take my clients on. And so learning to grow from that experience, grow as an individual, grow as a mother, grow as a person is my, that's my goal. I don't want to get stuck in the trauma of the loss. I want to grow from that experience. So when you're working with anyone, sometimes what happens is people who have a friend who is grieving or a relative, I will often hear it's, it's like, you know, oh, you know, they always do this and they're just stuck. And it's been two years. And why do we have to do these tributes? It's been 15 years. Why do we have to remember the baby that we never knew? Usually that's you judging that they're doing it wrong. That's you not being comfortable with the grief conversation. And so sometimes you need to look at yourself. Is this making me uncomfortable? Because often that projection that they're doing it wrong, they've been, it's too long, they shouldn't be this sad anymore. That's usually person witnessing it and worried thinking they're doing it wrong. So it's more, is this healthy and not healthy? Is it better way to kind of view it? Yeah. I recall Anthony, it's probably worth sharing in the beginning, obviously everyone near and dear to me was very worried about me. And even people I didn't know very well, I felt like I was in a fish bowl. I felt like everybody was watching everything that I did. And I felt like I was like under a microscope and I felt like I didn't have a lot of space to breathe and really be myself and feel what I needed to feel. Cause I, on one breath, I knew I was going to be okay, but on the other breath, I wasn't okay, but I didn't want people worrying about me because I knew I'd be okay. I hope that makes sense.
Anthony Hartcher:It certainly does. And when you touched on that guilt and shame, the first thing that came to mind was if someone has a friend or relative or someone they know that's committed suicide, then I can imagine there'll be a lot of what ifs, if I had have, you know, reached out to that person, what if I had have went over and, you know, like, so I'm thinking that what if, and those scenarios around guilt and shame very much relate to anyone that's, you know, experienced loss through suicide. So yeah, really keen to have, you know, touch on that conversation around, because as you probably aware, I think eight every every day in Australia commit suicide. So there's certainly listeners and I've been touched by, you know, suicide. So yeah, really keen for us to go onto that side of things around helping the person to move through that guilt and shame and work through that acceptance. I'm not sure if that's part of your process, but maybe we start on that.
Christy Roberts:Yeah, it is absolutely part of the process because self-directed healing, I mean, at very high level, I just teach people how to feel. So whatever it is, then we sit with that, whether that's a belief or an emotion, it doesn't matter. Suicide is a really important conversation because it's very misunderstood. So people who die by suicide and notice the language that I'm using, I never say the words committed suicide, because, because of the intent that that that we assume when we say that. Often what happens with suicide, because it's so misunderstood, it is a mental health issue. And people who attempt suicide, who are interviewed afterwards, they will usually say they didn't actually want to die. That wasn't the goal. The goal was they wanted the pain to stop. And they're in so much pain that what happens is the thinking gets thwarted and fragmented. And some people, when they're in so much pain, have a door in their mind and it's like an out. It's, there's another way, there's another way out of this pain. Not everyone has that door in their mind. And the people who don't have the door in their mind will never understand why someone takes that path. But anyone who has that door in their mind will get it. And I don't have that door in my mind, but I can honestly say when Aaron died, I remember the first time I went to the grocery store. Grocery stores are one of the biggest trigger points for grievers, by the way, because there's just memories and reminders everywhere you go. I was feeding an 18-year-old man, and then all of a sudden you're at the grocery store, it's like Weet-Bix, two-minute noodles. I didn't need any of that stuff. Everything I looked at reminded me of Aaron. And then you see other people and it reminds you, it's really, supermarkets are awful. I was backing out the driveway the first time I went grocery shopping, and I just thought, I can't do this. I don't even want to live this life. Now, I never thought that I would die by suicide. That wasn't there, but I absolutely understand that it's not uncommon for people after a severe loss, when they're in that acute survival stage, when the loss has just happened, for them to just go, you know what, this is actually too hard. And so learning to appreciate that, I mean, I can move anyone who has suicidal ideation, I can move them in one session, one session. So if any of your listeners out there are in that space, I absolutely invite them to to reach out or if they know anyone, because we can, we can shift this pretty fast. And I sit with the part of them that doesn't want to be here. And we give that some space to actually process and breathe. And then it passes, and then the head and the heart catch up. It's powerful work. But going back to the what ifs, the what if, the if only, because with suicide, it is one of the least supported losses, less people attend the funerals, and not just suicide, any mental health, overdoses, addictions, that sort all those things as well. They're just very misunderstood. And there can often be a lot of shame around that. And people not prepared to have the conversations because they sometimes can be a perception by people who are uninformed to think that, you know, well, that was their choice, or they'll get very angry. Why? How could they do that to you? How could a mother leave behind children? You just don't do that. It's because they're in so much pain, their mind is not actually thinking logically or straight. And so the what if, the if only, the shoulda, the coulda, the woulda, normal and natural, again, especially in those first few months, your mind needs to process. But what can happen is we can get attached to stories that aren't true. And we can assume responsibility that we don't have. Like if we had the power to stop death, if we knew that person was going to suicide, odds are we probably would have done something about it. But the thing is, is we don't know. But our mind likes to control, our mind likes to make sense of things. And we assume responsibility and we take on control that that we just don't have. We don't have those superpowers. And so it comes back to being kind to yourself. It comes back to really questioning the bullshit that you're telling yourself, because I trust I can say that. Because suffering, when it comes to grief, pain is inevitable. This is important. Pain is inevitable when it comes to grief and loss. You will experience pain. But suffering, which is the monkey mind, it's the stories, it's the what if, shoulda, coulda, woulda, if only, is optional. It's normal and natural in the first acute stages. But as time goes on, we need to work with them and we need to really question them. And we need to decide is this healthy, not healthy, resourceful, unresourceful, is this good, not good. And if you need help with that, you need help with that. We can't do this stuff on our own. I couldn't have done this, even though I was highly experienced. I need, still needed that external support to challenge some of the stuff that I was saying, doing, because you don't know, you're so caught in it, you don't see it objectively.
Anthony Hartcher:So this process that you're, it requires guidance, I take it, because, yeah, so it's a guided process. Do you want to just sort of articulate someone, a listener was to reach out, what would they expect?
Christy Roberts:Yes, it's called self-directed healing and it needs guidance initially. But the reason it's called self-directed healing is because I actually teach people how to do it themselves. I don't want people to be relying on having to get therapy and support forever. You know, it really is just learning to process your own emotions. So we start, it's very, one of the things that I love about this, this is my corporate background coming through, is that we test and measure everything. So I will measure how much grief you feel, how much sadness you feel, how much anger, how much, how much you blame yourself, out of 10. So we measure, there's about 30 different measurements we do before measuring, then we'll go into the healing. And we actually, whatever was the most and the highest thing, we actually feel that. So I'll get them to say, I miss you, dad. And then in it comes, it's like, where is it in your body? So what are you feeling? Grief. I feel sad. I'm angry. So let's say it's angry. I'm angry. Where is it in your body? It's in my fist. We'll feel it in the fist, the right fist or the left fist. It's the right fist. We feel it. We feel it more. We feel it fully. And we try to blow it up. Like literally we want to feel it at its maximum intensity. And then what happens is it will pass. Because emotions fleeting in nature, it will come, it will go. It's very organic. It's like grief. It's like a wave and you ride the wave, but you want to ride that wave all the way to shore. You know, Benjamin J Harvey, one of my mentors, he says, if you're going to cry, cry like crying's an Olympic sport and you're going for gold like, you know, go hard. So that's what we do. We really sit with the energy, the guilt, the shame, whatever it is, apathy, really just hold that space in the body. And even if it's, I feel nothing, I'm numb and I'm disconnected, which is a trauma response, then we sit with, I feel empty, I feel nothing. Like whatever it is, that's what we sit with. And we feel it as fully as we can, and then it will pass. Now if it doesn't pass, it is serving you in some way, shape, or form. It doesn't mean it's serving you in a healthy way, but it is serving you. And so then we get really curious around how it's serving you, because we want to distinguish whether this is actually good, because I work with clients and their anxiety serves them, for example, but it's serving them in healthy ways. So we don't want to actually get rid of it. We just want to get more curious about it and maybe redefine the language that we're using around it, and then if it's serving them in an unhealthy way, we need to kind of work with that, well, what does that part of you need in order to heal completely, and then we get curious about that. And so it's just about moving you through. One of the things I love about self-directed healing, because it's so fast, like it's really fast, is people can move through, when I'm working with a grief client, this is not a year process, this is a couple of sessions. So I have, like, this life reimagined program, three month program, bang, bang, bang, we get in, like it's done, and people are back to where they want to be. So it's very cool. It's very fast. We're literally just working with the energy of the emotion, and we can work with the belief too. You know, I'm not good enough, I don't belong. I feel all alone. Because what can happen in grief is grief can amplify our old wounds. So if you had a sense of feeling alone before, you will feel even more alone in your grief. If you had a sense that you were different or didn't belong, you will feel even more different, even more that you don't belong in your grief. And so the other thing that the self-directed healing enables us to do, is we can go back and we can work with the child, so we can do the inner child work. And it does also have, you can do ancestral work, and that sort of thing as well. I don't promote that broadly, but sometimes the session can take us into ancestral stuff. If the clients feels, and I intuitively feel I need to go there, that's where we'll go. But it's a very empathic process, like I actually sit with my clients energy, I can feel when it's in the throat, when it's in the heart, when it's in the stomach. I usually connect quite intuitively with my clients and support them. Sometimes they're feeling it. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes I feel it before they do. It's very, very cool when you develop this skill set, where it can take you.
Anthony Hartcher:And I assume you can do this both online and in person?
Christy Roberts:Yeah, I'm primarily online. I do have space in my house, but I usually just work online. It's easier. The energy is just as potent and powerful. I mean, I train practitioners globally. You know, I've worked with women in Iran, and men in Texas, and all around the world. And, yeah, it's energy. It's, you're just working with energy. You're working with the emotion. So, yeah, it's really powerful online, very cool.
Anthony Hartcher:And that, I think it segues well into, how can the listeners best connect with you, given that you've shared the process, how simple it is, and how fast they can get results. So how can they best connect with you?
Christy Roberts:Yeah, I have my website's quite active. It's christyrobertscoaching.com, that's a really great place to go, but to connect with me, yep, website, book a discovery call. I offer free discovery calls, so if anyone wants to explore the different programs that I have, or the different work that I do, and wants to explore if that's a good fit for them or for someone that they know, then the discovery call is the best. It's the easiest way to do that and have that conversation. Yeah. I also have a YouTube channel. I'm on Facebook. You know, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, the handle's@christyrobertscoaching.
Anthony Hartcher:Yeah. And for the listeners, I'll share all those links that Christy mentioned in the show notes, so you can just go directly to the show notes and click on those links and reach out and book your discovery session with Christy. And I just want to thank you so much, Christy, for sharing such great insight and sharing all your expertise and being so open and vulnerable around sharing your experience. So I really appreciate you doing this for the me&my health up listeners.
Christy Roberts:Oh, you're most welcome. You know, it is such an important conversation, so I'm really grateful that you've reached out. And for anyone out there, you know, you're not alone. There's many resources and many things that you can do. So you know, it's about learning to empower yourself. You know, I'm really here to help people empower themselves, because we can get stuck in our loss. You know, I for quite a while there, I was actually serving me to be sad, and it took me a lot of work to sort of move through that, because my sadness was keeping me connected, but I found a much healthier way to do that now.
Anthony Hartcher:And to the listeners, empower others. So anyone that you know that is experiencing grief or really struggling with loss, please share this episode with them. We'd love to get it out to as many people as possible and to serve them and to really empower them. Please do that, listeners and continue to health up.
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