Grieving Someone You Can’t Imagine Life Without: Finding Purpose After Tragedy

uh settings. Can I do that? Hold on. I want to mirror my camera so that when I when I look at you, see, I look at you now. I'm looking at you as opposed to like looking out the the window over there. So, okay. Yeah. So, that's the show. It's I mean, it's really fun like we're doing right now. Um we could go off on tangents like Edith Bunker. We could do a lot of that, but there you go. Great. All right. Are you ready? I'm ready. Let's get started. Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Keeping It Real on Purpose. I am your host, Edna White, and today we have an esteemed guest, which I am so happy to have on that she brings along some brilliance. Today's guest is Dr. Michelle Picales. Am I saying it right? Picolis. Picolis. Okay. an inter international best-selling author of Step into Your Brilliance, award w award-winning filmmaker of Secrets of Life and Death, and a dynamic speaker and life transformation coach. Dr. Michelle is helping high achieving midlife women who've experienced major loss to release complex grief and reconnect with their soul's purpose. I love it. Through her powerful serve free framework, she dis she guides women to heal, reset their mindset and step fully into their authentic brilliance. Please welcome the inspiring Dr. Piticas. Thank you so much. That was a beautiful introduction. Oh, you're welcome. So, how do you show up in the world? Tell our audience. Right now, I'm showing up in the world a lot on podcasts and I've started really jumping into social media and posting on social media and and writing emails and wanting I really want to get my message out to help people like you're helping people to to reclaim their purpose to live their purpose. That's my purpose. That that is what came through to me when my mother died. That is my purpose is to wake other people up because when she died is when I woke up. That's why I work around the grief is because when you lose somebody or you have that really traumatic experience, it's that moment when you really question everything and you actually have the motivation to do something. Gotcha. Good. That's good. You talk about transforming grief into fuel for one's sole purpose. Can you walk us through how you your serve framework makes that possible? Sure, I'd be happy to. So serve has got five steps and I'm going to go over briefly all of them and then if you want to I can go into depth on some of them but the number one is S which is surrender and that means to surrender to the process and so many of us are taught to resist our grief because our culture doesn't really appreciate it doesn't like it doesn't want you to cry wants you to you know be a consumer and grief really takes you out of that number two is E which is engage that is when you lose when you have a significant loss at the bottom of that loss is a loss of relationship whether it's a job or it's an identity or it's really a person or a divorce there is a loss of connection and human beings are social beings we are actually wired to bond bond with each other. And so grief is it's actually wired into our body. It's the body's way of kind of encouraging us to get back in and reconnect again because that's good because we survive better in relationship with people. Well, that's good. It's good. So engage is part of my serve process. I literally focus on that after we deal with the surrendering to emotions. How do you get that support you need? Not just but from me, but from other people in your community. And how to identify the people that are right for you because grief changes your address book. Oh, that's good. Yeah, that's really good. Very true. Very true. I mean, and it really it's actually great because it really really puts who are your real friends who are really there for you and who aren't. This is very true. Very very true. Oh, you're you're you bring about so many important issues. Um, but I want you to finish the the the rest of the letters because it's very intriguing. Yeah. So, the next one is reframe. So the stories we tell ourselves about our loss can keep us stuck. In fact, the the whole grief group model, it actually detrimental for two reasons. One is you bond with everybody else in the group, so you never want to leave. And number two, you tell the story over and over and over again. And each time you tell the story, you re-trigger the grief. Yes. Yes. So you actually need to start changing the story what what it means to you and see yourself less as a victim and more empowered. And that's what I work with people on is how do you become re-empowered from loss and then the other two one is the next one is V which is for vision. So I don't stop there with okay now you're feeling better. Although plenty of people say oh I'm good enough now. Yeah, I'm good enough now. Yeah, I'm good enough now. No, no. The reason why you have grief in the first place is because you are not living your purpose. Yeah. The universe is always nudging us to say, okay, you need to step up. So vision of how can I utilize this experience to live my purpose? How is it telling me what I need to be doing? Yeah. And then finally, uh the last E is express. In other words, it's not enough to have a vision in your head. You need to put it out there in the universe. That makes sense. That makes sense. I love everything you just said. But the most important one, cuz I was clapping my hands, is that we keep saying the story and we keep telling the story and telling the story till it's etched in us and we don't move forward. Then we wonder why we're stuck. It's like taking dirt and there's an opening for you to go, right? But you this telling the story over and over again. You're shoveling the dirt into the hole and pretty soon you're like, "How do I get out?" You know, it's like you're trapping yourself. Talk about that. Talk about that being that stuck in in in in telling that story over and over again. Uh well it it literally re-triggers because whatever our brain is thinking our body believes it's real. It doesn't really know the difference between what's in our head and what's actually out there. So when you relive the experience of somebody dying for example, you literally re-triggering all that those emotions. And then often times with grief there's both regrets and resentments. And so there's other things that kind of take us down into the rabbit hole, take us down deep underground. And so part of the reframing is changing the resent resentments and the regrets. Re Let me explain what those two are for your our audience here. So um regrets are what you did or did not do that you feel bad about. And a lot of people have that. Oh, I should have gotten him to to uh see the doctor earlier. I I should have spent more time with them instead of running around to all these doctor appointments or, you know, regrets there. And then resentments. And this is a hard one because, you know, let's say somebody's died and you're like, there you are having to take the garbage out, which they used to do, or you know, there they are. they now you have to hire somebody to go fix something in your house and they used to take care of that or anything like that and also that they left you. So it's all this sort of abandonment. So this is where it comes to complex grief. I work with people who are stuck and I I might tell you a few stories about that. But the complex grief is that the current grief is magnified by earlier losses that have never been resolved. And our sense of safety and security is is originally programmed in our childhood. So if we've experienced like a emotional abandonment or actual abandonment, I run into a lot of women who they lost their father. Their father moved off, divorced and so they their sense of safety is hugely hugely impacted by that. Yeah, absolutely. Is it wrong to have regrets to acknowledge them? Well, it's not wrong to acknowledge them, but sometimes they're not realistic. And it helps to be to have a coach that's going to help you to look at what's realistic and what's not. Of course, we make mistakes. We're human beings. Right. Right. Learn from them. So, of course, I have a huge I had a huge regret when my mother died. Of course. Yeah. because I was sitting in her studio going through papers. She was a toy designer. Okay. Actually sold her designs to toy companies, major toy companies in New York with my aunt. Anyway, she sit we're sitting in her studio going and I'm going through papers. the beautiful daughter trying to clean things up ahead of time. And I pick up one of them and it's one of her designs, one of her ideas, one of her babies. And I hand it to her and I say, "It's a Xerox copy. Do you need this anymore?" And she looks at it and she says, "Oh, I guess I'll never finish that project." Oh, for the first time I understood debt and deadline and how and that's why life purpose is so important to me is that in that moment I realized, oh my god, we die and we only have a limited amount of time and we might run out. But but here's the kicker. In that moment, I took the paper back and I said, "We don't need to deal with this right now." And that moment of intimacy with my mother that I had all my life, I just threw it away. Yeah. I had huge regrets. But you know, those regrets often are the motivation. Yes. Yes. Doing things and for telling people. So when my brother died, I got an airline ticket to go back and be with my family. And because I did that, everybody else in that family took that death seriously. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like if you take it seriously so much that you get on an airplane all the way back to the East Coast from the from California, they're like, "Oh, okay. I guess this is important." Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. That's good. The motivator. I like that part about the motivator. So, good stuff. I'm gonna tell you something. Grief is not processed. We we we we we get we have it and then we not we don't process it. I'm working with a client that, you know, had two deaths in a row, a husband and a child. Yeah. Um older, you know, older child. And she never stopped to process it until this year. And it's been four years. you know, she never stopped. And that brings me to my next question with you. Many high achieving women hide their pain behind their success. How do you help them recognize and release complex grief without feeling like they're losing control? Well, that is a tricky one because part of it is that you have to lose control in order to regain control. That's really good. That is excellent. That's the answer. Yes. Yes. I love it. I love it. So, uh women what what they have to realize is that they're already stuck, you know, and that's why they come to me is that they are stuck. They're not moving forward. They they are being held back. And so then this is the process. You cannot go around it. Cannot circumvent it. Cannot tamp it down. And here's the real kicker is that if you do not process your grief, that means you're literally holding those emotions in with muscular energy. Oh, that's good. And that means that you could be setting yourself up for serious illness. Yeah. Because the fluids in your body are meant to flow. You know, I mean, let's the lymph system. It's supposed to the blood system and you're holding it. Sometimes I give people this little exercise where they hold their hands in a fist and I ask them to hold it and I only hold it for like maybe one or two minutes and then I say, "Imagine what it would be like to hold that fist for all day, years." Years. And that's what we do. We hold it in. Yeah. Of course we do. Yeah. Because you know as as a high achieving woman too as well I've learned around the way that if I don't take care of the grief I don't if I don't go through the process of even acknowledge maybe even a job loss you know even being you know even being fired from a job or maybe maybe your animal dying you know what I'm saying you know or maybe moving from an apartment or a house that you've been in for years you know those are all losses and if you don't process them. If you don't feel them, if you don't go through it and recognize now I'm in in the now. This is different, you know, and do that process that you're talking about um it will come out somewhere else. It will it will show itself strong in something else and you'll be like, well, why did I scream when the pin when they dropped the pin, right? Why did I, you know, why did I scream, you know, um and we're having such a great time and somebody said they don't want to do something. Why did I scream? because of loss, you know. Right. Right. Our grief has not been, you know, um processed. That's right. That's right. And it needs And so, of course, there's the the the phrase emotion. Energy in motion. When you repress that energy, it doesn't go away. It doesn't dissipate. It's in there waiting place. Waiting. Finds another place. Girl finds another place to act up. Yeah. It's like it's like having a like you know we when we don't process these things and I think this is how I feel is we have an inner child you know that hasn't you know in some of us have not been healed. So just to think about the things that we hadn't healed from childhood then we're going to pack this on this kid's back. So guess what this kid's going to do? Act up. Have a tantrum. Yeah. Have a whole tantrum. Tantrum. Yeah. Yeah. going to have a tantrum and show up behave badly whatever going to have it be and you because you're adding to what's already you know was has already happened. So grief really needs to be and I'm glad that you're doing such a work grief needs to be processed and we say this we hear it we it's written everywhere it's you know it's a thing but we just don't do it well most people don't know how to do it that's true a lot of things we never been told. Exactly. Right. And you have to have an awareness of your body. You know, they put little kids in these little desks when we're like four or five years old and then we're told not to speak, not to wiggle, not to talk. And we are trained to not even pay attention to our bodies. And when our bodies hurt, we're trained to take a pill or to go to the doctors and stuff it. Stuff it. Yeah. And yet the body is telling us all the time, you know, this is good, this is not good, right? And we have to listen to that body. We really do because um I remember when I was working um in a specific uh role, I would I knew I was getting burnt out. I just knew it and I tried to push past it. Well, once you push past it after knowing and being aware, you push past it. get it goes to your body cuz now it's tapped into your your soul. Your it's your your mind is telling you I'm getting burnt out. Get you get the first flag and the second one. Okay, now I'm going to ignore that. I'm then it goes straight to your body. And so I'm I'm like every time I got like this thing in my neck, I'm like, "Oh my god, what's going on? I can't even move my neck. I couldn't even move my neck because the stress of it, the thought of it was setting into my my my um my neck. Yeah. That's the that's when it starts to really affect you. I want to tell you that when it starts like a cracking an egg, you know, the egg is good on the inside, but the minute you start cracking it outside, something changes about everything. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, you have to you have to take care of that. And that that's so important what you do. Go ahead. So one other thing I wanted to say I'm giving you all these little great where the difficulty occurs in your body because your body speaking to you has meaning. So for example anything to do with the neck this is the throat chakra. This is your ability to speak the truth. That's it. And then anything that's in the back is from the past. Yes. Holding on to it, trying to get holding on to, you know, something some old habit that says, "No, I'm just going to It's fighting to get out. And it's like, yeah, it's fighting to get out, get away from you, but you keep holding on to it." It's really true. We do a lot, you know, we do a lot to ourselves, and like you said, it's not enough to hear it floating around out there in the internet, online. what it's the how to and that's where you come is how do I process this how do I get this you know through to my life and it really so let's h go ahead go ahead it really helps to have somebody as a witness yes to and to see what's going on sometimes people aren't aware I can see I can see what's going I can feel what's going on in you and that's how I help people to be learn to listen to their body absolutely and learn how to express their emotions and I can teach it very very quickly. Absolutely. That's great. That's great. So, let's hop on over to your film Secrets of Life and Death where explore some deep deep deep truths. What inspired you to tell that story and how does that tie into your coaching work now? Well, thank you for asking. So I told you about my mother and that moment of realization and my mother was for me the poster child for living your passion. She had six children and she was running a toy business and you know somewhat to the neglect of her children because you six children and a busy father and a busy mother. Yes. And uh and if she could have regrets where did that leave me? And I was totally totally tacked down. I was not living my life. I was what so many women are in this culture, a people pleaser. I was worried about everybody else. And I didn't even know what I needed. I didn't even know how to tell what I wanted and what I didn't want. Right. I would ask other people, "Well, what are you having at the restaurant?" And then I would just have that. I wouldn't even ask what what do I want? Right. Yes. So, so she you're so touching things that I'm I'm experiencing right now. Go ahead. Go ahead. I'm so excited. It's okay. It's okay. It's great. It's great. So So what I decided was I was impressed by this experience of somebody dying. First my father from Alzheimer's uh six months before and then my mother. So I lost them both in the same year. And I was so impressed by the impact because I was offline emotionally and boy did it bring me online. It just that's that's the real gift is like you can't you can't really I mean some people can hold it down but boy it just it knocked me over and I said okay I need I need some healing. And so I think that making my movies was my healing process. I went and I got to interview people and ask them questions and I learned so much. And so I made three films. One was on what it was like to face death. I had amazing amazing people. What was involved in caregiving? Because I thought I was like terrible at that. And then finally grieving, you know, what what is that like and how do you grieve and how do you move forward? and and in the process I joined hospice and that's when I started uh doing uh partner loss support as a facilitator. But the the films are still great. They still are relevant. They're probably a little bit uh dated because I think um the old Bay Bridge was still up back then. There's a shot of that. Uh but other than that, uh the stories are always real. They're always relevant. Oh, absolutely. You can tell it took me a long time. It took me 10 years to do those films. So, I recommend that instead you see a coach and you get you get back into life sooner rather than make a film, which by the way, even if you do it on a sho string, budget still costs a lot of money. Mhm. Mhm. And I know I've heard that, but that that I can see in the book in what you do. I could I mean, not the book, the the film and what you do. I could see how it it works in tandem. Pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty cool. So, in your book, Step into Your Brilliance, your your guide, you guide readers toward authenticity, which is one of my favorite things. I teach about it as well. Yes. Um, what does brilliance mean to you and how can women reconnect with it after a major life disruption? Okay. So, brilliance for me is spirit. It's like that shining light inside of us that we all come into this world with. It's like this is who we really are. This is our higher self and and it really emanates. In fact, if you look at early baby pictures of yourself, you can see it shining in those eyes. Yeah. it's there. And then we're learn, we learn that in order to survive, we have to do other things. And for me, I learned not to be myself. I learned to be what other people wanted of me. And so, absolutely. So, one of the gifts of grief is that it is so intense. If you've lost a really important person, it's so intense that you cannot be anything but authentic. You cannot be the old caregiver or supporter or person that everybody turned to because you don't have the bandwidth. And so that is the first step towards becoming your authentic self is allowing those feelings and allowing who you really are. And then there there there's so many ways in which you can discover who you are by that experience. Mhm. And that's where the the light starts to shine through is that you you can't hold it in anymore. And because you realize if somebody's died, oh right, we only last, you know, we have a finite amount of time. Yeah, absolutely we do. And we don't want to die with regrets. That was for me. I did not want to die with regrets. It's true. How do you how do you resolve um regrets? And maybe you can help me with this. Res re re resolve regrets in investing time into people who really didn't get it. Like just people that didn't respect it, didn't like it, didn't want it, threw it away. How do you resolve that? Because I know that's a grief in itself. So how do you deal Let's see if I'm understanding your question. How do you deal with people who reject you for being your authentic self basically is what it is. Okay, so that's hard. Uh the key is to find people who don't not to go chasing after the people that are wrong for you. And that's part of the transformation is to see where the gold is. And that's all our journey for all of us is to see who we are meant to serve. And we're not meant to serve people who don't like who we really are. Right. Right. Yeah. I Yeah. Because I f I'm finding, you know, and and Excuse me. Excuse me. Cooper. Cooper. Is that a Chihuahua? No, that's a s'mor. Hold on a second. Yeah, he thinks he's a Rottweiler. But anyway, I am going through this transition in my my journey my my journey through walking through the libraries kind of pulling out the the things that I see that you feel healing in my soul. Okay, we're going to cut that part, right? Say that again. Okay. So I I've been going through through you know with on my journey you know during meditation and going through the the recesses of the library you know when you go to your third eye and you kind of walking around seeing what glows kind of get a resolve ask yourself that question why is this how can I resolve this and one of the things that came out of that library was the regrets of of putting my time into people who didn't love me in the past like um recent past and you know like my my ex-husbands didn't re didn't love who I was. I spent monumental years that five minutes is too much for me. Wasting five minutes is too much for me but years. Yeah. And I I'm trying to resolve that like how do I it's it's bringing up so much resentment for me. So how do I resolve that? Like how do I Right. Yes. That was the experience and and I know that I learned something for it. But that's a real feeling. Regret is a real feeling. Then it, you know, it's a real feeling. Um, and it's not enough to say you're not supposed to regret. No, it's not. It's just like, but when you say that, it's almost like saying to somebody um who was sexually assaulted, oh, that was in the past. Yeah. That's the same phrase. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and it's it's similar, too. I mean because if you're with somebody who really doesn't like who you are, it is abusive. Yeah, it's abusive. So, how do you even get and I think I think you're answering my question now is think of it as an abuse. Really think of as an abuse and start to heal for the loss and the abuse. You just answered me knowing and you gave me the answer. Well, the other thing is you really need to release the anger and the the emotion of anger. Yeah. You really need to allow that. Yes. So remember what I had said about uh when people are grieving they re-trigger the the trauma over and over again with their stories. So when I work with people so this is a a secret uh technique I use. I encourage people to express their anger and gibberish so that they allow the emotions out but they don't re-trigger the anger over and over and over again because people can get stuck in loops. Mhm. So, you know, suppose you have this, you know, this anger. That's why, you know, in some of those, I guess it was crystalall groups, they would have people beating on pillows because you literally, you know, express it. Get it out of your body because you have to. You cannot start to change the mindset until you release the emotion. You're right. So, I guess I'll be attending some karate sessions and kicking. There you go. Yeah. soon as I'm better I because I I kept trying to resolve it you know be nice and it still came out it's like I don't have time you know it's like you know and and of course I am a Scorpio by by you know by um birth oh yes by the sun so it's like oh no no no patience no I have no you know I have patience to a degree but not for foolishness you know and it's just like okay so I really have to resolve this cuz I you know I don't want it to and I say this all the time. I don't want anything to create cancer in me. So I don't want to give it room. You don't want to give it any place that they can hold me. No fire girl. No fire. No fire. So um thank you for that answer. I I'm so glad. Thank you for that answer because that's how I'm going to resolve that. Second thing is um putting up boundaries. you know, um, because he is my children's father who they're old, they're they're in their 40s, right? I do. I have to maintain a conversation with him. Do I have to maintain a connection? That's what I would say is stay away until you have released your resentments and your emotions and you see him in a different way. Yeah. So ultimately what you want to get to is a point where you see him as a product of his own childhood upbringing. And then it's not about you, it's about him. And when you can get to that place after you've released your emotions, once you can get to a place like that where you see him as just, you know, a poor little boy that was, you know, abused in some way and felt, you know, like out of control with you and felt like he needed to control you, right? You know, and and change you so that he would feel safe. Then you can say, "Okay, you know, that's what I did with my parents because I had issues with them is like I I saw their story and I said, "Oh my god, they actually had a way worse story than I did." And then I had compassion. And once you can get to that place of compassion, then you can spend time. And when he says stuff that triggers, you may need to go away for, you know, go off to the bathroom and just release it and then you can go back again. Awesome. Well, you done doctorized me, doctor. This has been amazing. This has been good. This has been good for my soul. Thank you so much for being here. How can the world find you? Tell tell my audience how we can find you. Okay, so uh one thing I want to tell them is that I have a complex grief checklist uh in which you get an assessment to find out whether or not you are struggling with complex grief. And so that's simple complexgriefchecklist.com. Oh, nice. But als Yeah. So you can go there and I'll give you an assessment and then you'll get follow-up emails that will help you to start to implement some of the parts of the serve system. And if you decide, oh my gosh, I need to speak to her, you will get the link for scheduling a a session with me, a introductory call. And they can also go to my website which is a work in progress with a very slow website designer who is brilliant and uh it's it's there and uh it's secrets of lifeanddeath.com and you can e even see the trailers for the films and I have amazing blogs there about grief and loss awesomeness. Okay, thank you so much. It's been really wonderful talking about the grief's brilliance, what it could bring about for us with Dr. Michelle. This is Edna White and my esteemed guest. We're going to say goodbye for now. Bye.