What happens when the truth about a loved one’s suicide is revealed decades later? In this profoundly moving episode, Lisa opens up about her own story of “grieving in reverse” after learning that her father's death wasn’t what she had believed for 35 years.
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🧠 Episode Summary:
Lisa shares the painful and profoundly personal journey of discovering the truth about her father's death—35 years after it happened. What follows is a raw conversation about “grieving in reverse,” processing hidden trauma, and the courage to reframe our grief through radical acceptance and truth-telling.
🔍 Lessons Learned:
- The truth, even when delayed, has healing power.
- There is no expiration date on grief—or the right time to begin healing.
- Suicide is not a selfish act, but often the result of untreated mental illness.
- Rebuilding your narrative can help you honor your past and your future.
- Vulnerability fosters connection—and storytelling saves lives.
⏱️ Chapters:
00:00 – Trigger Warning & Opening
01:10 – What is “Grieving in Reverse”?
03:30 – Lisa’s Story: A Life Changed by One Conversation
07:50 – The Impact of Delayed Truth
13:00 – High Functioning Depression & Missed Signs
16:00 – Therapy, Support, and Letting Yourself Feel
19:15 – Rebuilding the Narrative After Loss
24:00 – Honoring a Loved One’s Legacy
26:05 – If I Could Talk to My Dad Now…
28:30 – Key Takeaways & Closing Thoughts
31:00 – Help Is Always Available
📚 Resources for Mental Health & Support
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🔹 Schoser Talent and Wellness Solutions – Mental wellness coaching & support – https://schosersolutions.com/
🔹 Sh!t That Goes On In Our Heads – A raw, award-winning mental health podcast – https://goesoninourheads.net/
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🎙️ See You Next Week! Stay strong, keep going, and remember: You are enough. 💜
00:00:01
The Survivors is brought to you by. Our friends at Schoser Talent and Wellness
00:00:05
Solutions. This podcast mentions suicide, mental illness,
00:00:08
grief and loss and may be triggering for some listeners. So
00:00:12
please take care of your mental well being by pausing or skipping any
00:00:15
sections that feel uncomfortable to you. And if you or someone you know is struggling,
00:00:19
please call 988 for support.
00:00:24
I'm really glad that the snort you just made
00:00:28
didn't get caught on audio
00:00:31
because people would have been very alarmed. I was alarmed.
00:00:35
Listen, I'm a little bit of an asshole, Okay? I get it.
00:00:39
Yeah. But you're my asshole. And I love you. And everyone listening loves you,
00:00:43
too. So we're back,
00:00:47
as we are every week, with another conversation. And I think
00:00:50
you all know what the conversation is about. We're talking about
00:00:55
suicide in some way, shape or form. And this one is.
00:00:59
This one could be a humdinger because this is
00:01:03
a very unusual
00:01:07
situation within an already nuanced subject.
00:01:11
You following? Yes. Okay. So we're already talking about
00:01:14
suicide, which is. We all know it's common,
00:01:18
but there's a cohort of people
00:01:22
in the world, there are a lot of us, I'm one of them,
00:01:25
who have had to do something called grieving in reverse. Have you ever heard
00:01:29
of it? Yes, I have. Well, you're just very well read. That's what
00:01:33
that says about you. So it's a little
00:01:37
snotty of you to be like, yeah, I've heard of it.
00:01:40
No, I'm just kidding. Wow. So grieving in
00:01:44
reverse is when the truth of someone's
00:01:47
suicide comes out after. After the fact.
00:01:51
In my case, 35 years
00:01:55
after the fact. And the
00:01:58
conversation that I'd love to have today, because I've had a lot of people
00:02:02
sliding into my DMs and sending me messages about
00:02:07
that happening to them because they've somehow heard or read that
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it's happened to me. And it's not a common thing,
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but I guess maybe it is a more common thing. And the reason for
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that, big reason for that is because
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suicide has been such a stigmatized thing forever. You
00:02:27
and I are working very hard to change that. But the truth is, it's been
00:02:31
a very stigmatized and taboo thing for a very long time. And so
00:02:35
the optics around suicide, that's the
00:02:39
thing that is the driver behind a lot of people changing the
00:02:43
story when someone dies that way. So
00:02:47
if you are listening to this podcast for the first time, or
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maybe you missed some of our conversations in our first
00:02:54
season where G shared her story of being
00:02:58
an attempt survivor, I Share my story of being a multiple suicide loss
00:03:01
survivor then if you haven't heard that, I'll give you
00:03:05
the 2 second recap about my own story because it's relevant to this conversation.
00:03:10
I lost my father when I was 10 years old. The story
00:03:13
that I was told by my mom was that my father had died of a
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heart attack. He was a very heavy smoker. Even though he was an active man,
00:03:21
heart disease ran in his family. There was no reason for my
00:03:25
10 year old mind to ever question that. So that is the narrative that I
00:03:28
lived with in my life for 35 years until I
00:03:32
was 45 years old and I discovered by accident
00:03:36
that my father had actually died by suicide. And
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that's when not only I became a survivor, but I started
00:03:43
grieving for my father for the second time in my life
00:03:48
all over again. Like it was second one of
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minute one of day one all over again.
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And in my case
00:04:00
it wasn't an issue of optics per se.
00:04:04
The reason why my mother chose to change the story was not
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because she was embarrassed or shameful.
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It was because I was 10 years old, my dad was my person,
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and I just was going to be
00:04:20
devastated for the rest of my life that he was gone. My mother didn't want
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to add to that pain by telling me the truth that it was
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a suicide. So she was saving me, which to her credit
00:04:30
she did. She saved me from a lifetime's
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worth of a different kind of pain. So I experienced that
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years later in reverse. And
00:04:41
have you ever had that kind of a situation happen?
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I don't think, I don't think I have. So,
00:04:50
like, this is such an interesting like topic for me
00:04:54
because I, I can, I can understand
00:04:58
how painful that is
00:05:02
to have believed something your entire life
00:05:05
only to have that truth shattered in one conversation
00:05:10
and then having to go back and relive that pain
00:05:14
again, but in a different way. I,
00:05:18
it rips my heart out to think that
00:05:22
here was your mom, because back in the day, like
00:05:26
even more so back in the day than now,
00:05:29
suicide, that topic was highly
00:05:33
stigmatized. There's a lot of shame associated
00:05:36
with suicide and for her to want to
00:05:40
protect you for the rest of your life, but having found out like
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35 years later had to have been gut wrenching.
00:05:48
And I can't even begin to understand
00:05:52
what that was like for you or for others out there that are going through
00:05:56
that. Well, it's. First of all, thank you for that. I appreciate
00:05:59
that. I can only speak, obviously from my own experience.
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I can speak, I think pretty well, for my mom because
00:06:07
we have had a continued conversation. So I've
00:06:10
known this truth about my dad now for 11 years. So I have had a
00:06:14
little bit of time to process and, and to acclimate to
00:06:17
the fact that I'm actually a suicide loss survivor
00:06:21
and so has she. And so we have had this 11 year long conversation
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which you know all about and it's just so unbelievably beautiful.
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But I remember like there are defining moments, there are watershed
00:06:33
moments in your life. And you know, I remember where I was when,
00:06:37
you know, such and such a thing happened. And I. You remember the feelings and
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the smells and the sounds. I remember
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absolutely vividly, like it happened 20 minutes ago,
00:06:47
that conversation that changed the course of my life. And
00:06:50
I remember hearing my mother
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validate. I asked my mother a question I never expected to ask her.
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I didn't even know I was going to ask it until it was coming out
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of my mouth. And I asked if my father had taken his life, which I
00:07:03
had never had a reason to ask, never thought to ask.
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I asked, she said yes. And that changed
00:07:10
everything in that moment. And I was 45 years old when I asked her
00:07:14
that question, the minute it was out of my mouth and my
00:07:18
mother responded and said, yes, daddy did take his
00:07:21
life. I was a 10 year old child
00:07:26
sitting in my aunt Charlotte's
00:07:30
silver opal at the end of my street on the same day that my
00:07:34
mother told me in my aunt's car that
00:07:37
my dad had died. It was
00:07:41
the most surreal feeling I have ever experienced in my life. Because
00:07:45
you have this narrative. Like in my case, I had this narrative for
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three and a half decades of my life. For the better part of my life,
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3/4 of my life, I had this narrative and
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I idolized my father. And then all of a
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sudden, wait, my dad was the one who left. My
00:08:05
dad was the one who chose to go.
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I mean, you talk about a mind fuck.
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There is no mind fuck that I have ever experienced that is on
00:08:17
that level. It is, it is something
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that is indescribable. And
00:08:26
it took me years to even
00:08:29
wrap my head around the fact that it could be true because. And you and
00:08:32
I have talked a million times about the types of people
00:08:36
who are out there who have either tried to take their life or have
00:08:40
successfully taken their lives. They're either the people who
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you don't know anything is wrong, or the people who you did know
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something was wrong and it still happens anyway, we didn't know anything was
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wrong. So I always had this impression of my father. He was
00:08:55
a hero, he was my best friend, he was larger than life.
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And all of a sudden now he
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left. So there is just so
00:09:07
much deep and indescribable
00:09:11
pain that goes along with that.
00:09:15
And people have to understand that when all of a
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sudden you find yourself in that situation, like everything is turned
00:09:22
inside out, upside down and is being shaken all at the
00:09:26
same time. And, and for me, like,
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that had to be like the hardest moment
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in your life. But I'm, I'm going to give credit back
00:09:37
to your mom. Such incredible strength because here she had this
00:09:41
little 10 year old nugget that she had to take care of and she
00:09:45
was making sure that you were going to be okay. And I'm sure it
00:09:48
was like you said, a mind fuck when you found out
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the truth. I, and I think
00:09:56
that, and I could be wrong, but I think this happens a
00:10:00
lot more for, you know, kids,
00:10:03
you know, whose parents had taken their life by suicide
00:10:07
and now, or finding out, you know, 15, 20, 30 years
00:10:11
later, like how that affects them and having to go back and
00:10:15
re, grieve again, but like a different kind of
00:10:18
grief. And then like all the questions that you have in your mind, you
00:10:22
know, it, it sounds to me like your dad was had, you know,
00:10:26
high functioning depression. That's me all, all in one
00:10:29
sentence. High functioning depression and
00:10:33
trying to like go back and figure out like what signs did I miss?
00:10:37
Why couldn't they be open with me? Same questions you would get that you would
00:10:41
probably have today. You, you know, found out somebody that you loved
00:10:45
had taken their life, but now you're having to go back and, and
00:10:49
rethink about what happened 35 years ago,
00:10:52
what might have triggered that. And like,
00:10:56
I, I, I can't imagine that, that kind of pain,
00:11:00
I can't. Express that kind of pain because there aren't words that I,
00:11:04
you know, I use words all the time. I write that for a living. I
00:11:08
talk for a living. I, I can't even sit here right now and come up
00:11:11
with words that would do justice to how that feels. Suffice it
00:11:15
to say it is the deepest, darkest, hardest pain I've ever
00:11:19
known in my life. And then what it did for
00:11:22
me. And I don't know if anybody listening who has had a similar experience. If
00:11:26
you have, please reach out to us, please reach out to me. Find me on
00:11:28
socials. I want to have a conversation with you, G. And I want to hear
00:11:31
from you. And I don't know if anybody else feels this
00:11:35
way, but it ended up Kind of altering
00:11:40
everything. It almost put this filter, I want to see if
00:11:44
I can express this right. It put a filter over everything that
00:11:48
I had ever experienced with my father. He was a huge mountaineer.
00:11:51
We hiked together. That was our thing. He was a race car driver. I spent
00:11:55
so much time at little tracks watching my dad
00:11:58
race. He was the property manager for my
00:12:02
grandparents real estate investment properties. I would
00:12:05
go and I was like my dad's little buddy, little right hand person emptying
00:12:09
quarters out of the washing machines on Saturdays.
00:12:13
And so we were inseparable. And I
00:12:16
hyper analyzed every single
00:12:20
thing that I could remember that we had done together
00:12:24
and moments and conversations and experiences
00:12:28
and was like, was that real? Was that real? Was he sick then?
00:12:33
Did I miss something? Was I. I mean, your, your brain
00:12:36
is just, it's like what I would imagine
00:12:40
snorting a line of coke would be like. That never wears off to your
00:12:43
brain that you're just now, all of a sudden, you've had this infusion of,
00:12:47
of something that illuminates everything in your brain and makes
00:12:51
you look at it twice again and go, wait, what? And that's how
00:12:55
it was for me for the longest time. And it's interesting,
00:12:59
my husband, Dave, we talk about your wife and my husband a lot
00:13:03
on this podcast. Dave, first of all, he was unbelievable
00:13:07
with me. He. From the second I found out, he. And he was the
00:13:10
only person that knew besides my mother and me for three years. And he was
00:13:14
just. Talk about a rock. He was just there and I was just
00:13:17
gripping on for dear life. And one of the things that he
00:13:21
said to me that was so profound because I got stuck in this place of
00:13:25
like, well, everything's different now, everything's different now. And
00:13:29
one day he just stopped and said, you
00:13:32
know, I know you feel like everything's
00:13:36
changed and I totally get why, but
00:13:39
nothing's actually changed. He said, every memory you ever had with
00:13:43
dad, the times that you hiked or you were around the
00:13:47
track, or you were watching Star Trek together, when he got home from work,
00:13:51
every one of those things happened.
00:13:55
And that joy was real joy. And he
00:13:59
loved you. And you know that. Like, can you look me in the eye right
00:14:02
now and say that he didn't love you? Of course I know my father loved
00:14:05
me. And he reframed
00:14:09
everything. He, he, he saved me from a lifetime of feeling that
00:14:12
way with that one comment. Because he was right.
00:14:16
It just changed the cause of his death. It
00:14:20
didn't change the kind of husband he was. It didn't change the kind of father
00:14:23
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00:14:26
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00:15:41
So, because like, this is a new concept to me
00:15:45
and I'm sure there's hundreds of other people out there, maybe
00:15:49
even thousands, that are dealing with
00:15:52
grieving in reverse. Like what are some things
00:15:56
that you've done to help you reframe it in
00:16:00
your head or help that grieving process?
00:16:05
I think that's a good question. No one's ever asked me that before because
00:16:09
I've honestly never had a conversation about grieving in reverse with anyone
00:16:13
until today. So this is really
00:16:16
cathartic for me too. What have I done? I think
00:16:20
I did above all, I did the thing that I
00:16:24
end up doing a lot, which is
00:16:27
to give myself permission to sit in it. Because
00:16:32
when I tell you I was in the Bermuda Triangle
00:16:36
of pain, just swimming in this endless black
00:16:40
sea of water and I just
00:16:43
needed to float until I found my way
00:16:47
to something solid. And I did that for a long, long time.
00:16:51
And I think that allowing myself
00:16:56
to feel things however I felt them was the
00:16:59
biggest favor I did for myself. Gift that
00:17:03
I give, gave to myself, whatever you want to call it.
00:17:07
I overnight changed from a kid who lost
00:17:11
their dad to a heart attack to a woman whose dad
00:17:15
took his own life. That is a club that no one wants to
00:17:18
ever be in and you don't have a choice with your membership card,
00:17:22
they just give it to you. And I didn't want
00:17:26
it. And I fought it for a
00:17:29
while. Like, this isn't possible. This isn't me. This isn't
00:17:34
What I want to attach to my grief or my father's memory.
00:17:37
And you don't have a choice, friends. It now
00:17:41
becomes truth. And we have
00:17:45
two ways we can deal with it. We either find a way
00:17:49
to accept it. We don't have to like it, but we have to
00:17:52
accept it for what it is. And
00:17:57
we have to somehow let it in and
00:18:00
integrate it. And I did that. And of course
00:18:04
I've done something very different, which is, you know, I
00:18:08
spend my time now I became a crisis counselor. I'm on crisis lifelines, taking calls
00:18:11
from people who are in that headspace who don't want to live any. That's my
00:18:15
way of dealing. I got involved with groups, I started
00:18:19
writing about it professionally. I journal about it.
00:18:24
That's what I did, I talk about it. And there are so
00:18:27
many different ways that people can
00:18:31
start that healing. But the biggest thing for me was just to
00:18:36
accept that I had to be wherever I was with it in that moment. And
00:18:39
that was okay. Okay.
00:18:42
And that helps. I think the other thing
00:18:47
is in your head because we all
00:18:50
rebuild anything that's happened in our lives. Like we have
00:18:54
these narratives in our head. How do you go
00:18:58
about rebuilding that narrative but also being
00:19:01
kind to yourself at the same time? Like, well, what I
00:19:05
used to believe in was blah, blah, blah, and now I'm learning
00:19:09
that blah, blah, blah. I'm trying to figure out how
00:19:13
in your own head how you rebuild that narrative.
00:19:18
That's a great question too. You're very spot on with the
00:19:21
questions today. This is very powerful for me. This is very. I feel like I'm
00:19:25
going to therapy right now. This is actually great. But I think
00:19:29
in all seriousness for me,
00:19:34
I. I had to start from a different
00:19:37
place. Some people may start from this place, some people may not.
00:19:41
I had a very different belief system
00:19:45
about suicide. So I came at
00:19:49
the whole concept of suicide and that kind of loss and grief
00:19:53
from a place of believing that it was a very selfish
00:19:57
act. Now again, if you don't know my
00:20:01
story, I have not just lost my father to suicide.
00:20:04
The year before my father died in 1977 when I was nine years old,
00:20:08
my cousin took his life. That was my first experience with
00:20:12
death, my first experience with suicide. Four years ago, one of my
00:20:16
closest childhood friends, mine and Dave's, took his own life.
00:20:20
So I am a three time survivor of this kind of loss.
00:20:23
But going all the way back to when I lost my cousin and
00:20:27
learned it was suicide and kind of learned in a very nine year old way
00:20:30
what suicide was, I developed A
00:20:34
belief system around what taking your own life meant.
00:20:38
In my brain, it was nothing I talked about with people, nothing anybody ever
00:20:42
fed me to believe, coached me to believe. It came out
00:20:46
of my own brain and heart. I believed. Well, why
00:20:49
didn't they just help themselves? Why didn't they just talk about it? Why didn't they.
00:20:53
That was really selfish, you know, that's what my nine year old brain felt.
00:20:58
And I lived with that very silently in my own
00:21:02
Heart for 35 years.
00:21:06
And then I learned my own father had taken his life. And I was like,
00:21:09
you gotta be kidding me. What?
00:21:13
And I for the very
00:21:17
I would say first few years there are pictures all over my house of my
00:21:20
dad. And I don't have very many pictures of my dad. So believe me when
00:21:23
I tell you the ones are. I will. I don't often show this, but I
00:21:27
will show you the only picture I have on my desk. This is the only
00:21:31
photograph that exists of me alone
00:21:34
with my father. And it is on my desk
00:21:38
every day. You are cutest little button there. Oh my God, what
00:21:42
is up with that hair? I, I don't even mom, really, what were
00:21:45
you thinking? Would that little hair do? If you can see I'm wearing literally like
00:21:49
I look, look like I just got off the laugh in show
00:21:54
Me and Goldie Hawn. So anyway, I was talking about photos and things like
00:21:57
that. I had them all over my house. And I always with my children, I
00:22:00
have two, we have two girls. And I always talked about my father like
00:22:04
my father was a living breathing human who was ready to walk through the door
00:22:07
any day. Now I all have always talked about my
00:22:11
father to my children and my friends and my family
00:22:15
in a very intentional way to make him a part of those
00:22:18
people's lives and memories. Because I always wanted my kids to feel
00:22:22
like my father was part of their life. Even Dave, because Dave never met my
00:22:25
dad. So when I found out that my
00:22:29
father died by suicide, I wasn't angry at my father for
00:22:32
leaving me that way. I was
00:22:36
furious at my father for leaving my then 40 year
00:22:39
old mother with a 10 year old child working part time as a secretary
00:22:43
at the nursing home up the street. I was bullshit
00:22:47
at my father for doing that to my mother and
00:22:51
changing the course of my mother's life and leaving her without a partner and a
00:22:54
best friend and all those things. It took me years
00:22:59
to find my way back to my father. And you know how I found
00:23:02
it? You know what the path was? It was
00:23:06
therapy. First of all, it was therapy
00:23:10
and it Was the understanding,
00:23:13
revelation, knowledge, epiphany, Call it what you
00:23:17
want. That suicide is not a selfish act,
00:23:20
that mental illness is an illness that needs to be
00:23:24
treated and acknowledged, and that my father had it in a time
00:23:28
when people didn't talk about it. There wasn't mainstream support
00:23:32
for it, and he couldn't bear the
00:23:35
pain anymore. So he made the choice to end his life was the only thing
00:23:39
that was in his control. Does that answer all your questions?
00:23:43
It does. I have one more
00:23:47
question, if you don't mind. I don't mind any questions.
00:23:50
How are you. How are you honoring your dad's memory now?
00:23:55
And how do you honor your truth?
00:23:59
I honor my truth doing this. I honor my truth with you
00:24:02
every single week. And I have for however many weeks that you
00:24:06
and I have been doing this together. Two seasons worth. I have a book
00:24:10
coming out. I don't talk a lot about it, but it's getting to that
00:24:14
point where it's sitting with my publisher right now,
00:24:17
and I've spent the last four months editing it with my amazing
00:24:22
editor. It's coming out next year. It's the story of losing my father
00:24:26
twice. I honor him through that. I
00:24:29
honor him by
00:24:33
creating the platform, the mental health platform that
00:24:36
I created and launched last year called the help hub. You can find it at
00:24:40
thehelphub. Co. It's always in the show notes. It is a
00:24:43
place that I created that offers
00:24:48
easy access to crisis support, hotlines,
00:24:52
content, tools to help anybody anywhere in any
00:24:56
community, whether you're in the queer community, the bipoc community,
00:24:59
Latinx, aapi, elderly veterans, you name.
00:25:03
It helps people find the help and support they need
00:25:06
to support their unique needs. Because I never, ever, ever want
00:25:10
someone to be in the place that my father was in and not get the
00:25:13
help that they need. So I honor him
00:25:17
like that. I honor him in. In all of those ways. I
00:25:21
honor him whenever I climb another mountain with Dave and the girls, I.
00:25:25
I honor him when
00:25:29
I'm there to listen and support. Listen to and support my mom
00:25:33
when she needs to talk about him. I honor him every which way I possibly
00:25:37
can. Okay, so I know it's
00:25:41
been a lot of questions this episode, but I love questions.
00:25:44
But I think that it's interesting for us
00:25:49
to talk about this. And so I have one last question and it
00:25:52
may or may not make you cry, and so I'm going to apologize for that
00:25:55
ahead of time. You don't have to. You never have to apologize for making me
00:25:59
cry. I'm a big crier. I cry Every. At everything. So if
00:26:03
you could talk to your dad now, what would you say? Oh, my God. Are
00:26:05
you kidding me with that shit right now? Oh, my
00:26:09
God. As I'm sitting here off camera, staring
00:26:13
at the photograph I just showed earlier of my father, and he's staring
00:26:16
at me with this little smirk on his face, what would I say to my
00:26:20
father? I had a conversation with him on Father's Day this year
00:26:24
talking to that picture. Oh, God. I don't even. Look,
00:26:27
there it goes. I don't even know if I can say this without crying. It's
00:26:31
not even humanly possible. No one has asked me that publicly.
00:26:35
And, friends, if you're hearing this, don't be sad. I'm not crying sad
00:26:38
tears. I'm crying happy tears. God.
00:26:42
I would just say that there has not been a
00:26:46
day that has gone by that I have not
00:26:50
loved you and thought of you and tried my very best.
00:26:54
Wow, this is awful. I feel like Peter Brady in the episode where his voice
00:26:58
changed. Oh, my God. I'm sure
00:27:01
your dad's looking down on you, like, with a little chuckle.
00:27:05
He's like, you're doing great. And look, I made myself cry. So, you know what?
00:27:08
We're okay. I know. I. Look, I would say that
00:27:12
I'm thriving and I'm doing
00:27:16
everything that I can in the ways that I know that
00:27:20
you would want me to, with the life that I have and with the
00:27:24
experience that I have. And I'm trying to make an impact
00:27:28
in all the most beautiful ways. And I will
00:27:31
never stop. And I love you. That is what I would say. And I know
00:27:35
he heard me because the clouds just moved out my window in a
00:27:39
funny way. So I just. I know in my heart he heard me.
00:27:43
And I. You know, I just. I wanted to thank you for sharing your truth
00:27:46
with us because there are so many other people out there
00:27:50
that are now just finding out, you
00:27:54
know, today that maybe their mom or dad or
00:27:58
an uncle or a grandparent or a child took
00:28:02
their life. And you.
00:28:05
That may have happened, like, five years ago, 10 years ago, 40 years
00:28:09
ago, and now you're having to regroup that loss.
00:28:13
So thank you for your openness because, you know, we're in this together
00:28:17
as a team, as, you know, an attempt survivor and a
00:28:21
loss survivor, and as a community. And as a community. And I'm so
00:28:24
fucking proud of you for everything that you put out into this world. So
00:28:28
thank you. I appreciate that more than you know. And I want to
00:28:32
leave a couple takeaways if I can, because I know we have a couple a
00:28:35
minute or so that I think are important for the people
00:28:39
who are listening to this, the people who've slid into my DMs saying, How do
00:28:42
I tell my child the truth? Or I just found out this
00:28:46
life altering truth, what do I do? Number one, there's
00:28:50
no expiration date on grief. There's
00:28:54
also no expiration date on the truth. Kids are
00:28:57
resilient. Lead with the truth. There is always an age appropriate
00:29:01
way to find something out. One of the weirdest comments
00:29:05
I can ever make that I hope people who hear me say this understand
00:29:08
is that one of the greatest gifts my mother ever gave me is telling me
00:29:12
the truth. And she did it at a time when I could
00:29:15
handle it and I knew that the world could support me.
00:29:21
Number two, finding out the truth later on in life, whenever
00:29:24
that may be, does not erase the love or invalidate any kind of
00:29:28
original grief that you ever may have. I've grieved twice. I own
00:29:31
that they were two different experiences. They both exist in
00:29:35
my life and in my story, and they're both valid. Number three,
00:29:40
secrecy. Keeping secrets adds layers of
00:29:43
trauma. And they can be healed, though, by
00:29:47
having conversations like this or with anyone or with a
00:29:51
therapist or with a friend. And you're also, number four, allowed to
00:29:55
regrive. You are a lot. You are encouraged, like it has to happen.
00:29:59
And there's always another way to reframe that loss. And
00:30:03
the last thing, number five, I guess if we're counting
00:30:07
speaking the truth, no matter when you do it, decades later
00:30:11
doesn't make a difference, is
00:30:15
an act of radical acceptance,
00:30:19
which is something I talk about with my therapist a lot. So if you're hearing
00:30:22
me right now and you know who you are, yes, that came from you.
00:30:25
Radical. Accept acceptance can be the greatest act of
00:30:29
healing that we can find. Thank
00:30:33
you so much for being so vulnerable today. And
00:30:37
you know, like Lisa said, if, if you have any questions
00:30:41
slide into our DMs, we're more than happy to, to answer
00:30:44
any questions. And even if you don't have a question and you just have something
00:30:48
you want to share, we want to hear that, too.
00:30:52
For sure. All right, boo. So I'll see you next week. Do
00:30:56
you love me as much as I love you? Maybe a little bit more. You
00:30:59
know what? I'm smaller. I have a lot more love to give. Okay, I like
00:31:03
that. I'll take that. I'll see you next week. All right, girl. Bye. Bye.
00:31:07
Thanks for joining us on the Survivors. Remember, no matter how tough things
00:31:11
feel, you are enough and the world needs you just the way you are.
00:31:15
You're not alone in this journey. There's a community here and every step forward
00:31:19
counts. We're so grateful you took the time to listen, and we hope you'll
00:31:22
take one day at a time. Just know there's always more light ahead.
00:31:27
Thanks for being here. Friends, Just remember, help is out there
00:31:31
in so many different places. So if you or someone you know. Is struggling,
00:31:35
please call 988 and a trained crisis counselor like me will be
00:31:39
there to help. You can also find an inclusive and. Comprehensive directory of
00:31:42
mental health research resources. Tools and content at thehelphub.
00:31:46
Co. Just remember that help is always. Just a call or
00:31:50
a click away. We'll catch you next week. In the meantime, keep
00:31:53
surviving.