Ep. 11 Coaching Lesson 1: Letting Go of Regrets

Power your own life! If you want to heal from any pain or simply acquire the tools to enhance your life transformation process, this coaching episode from Lesson 1 of my online course “Get Me Started” from the Beyond Bereavement series, will teach you about the two essential mindset practices you need to help you let go of regret and start to create the life that you really want.
 
As a bereaved mom for over seventeen years, Author, Angel Healing Practitioner and Grief Coach, this coaching series will give you the tools and mindset to help you triumph over every challenge and if you are bereaved, integrate loss into your life as only one part of your experience. Each lesson will show you how to tap further into your personal power to consistently create the transformation you want, and feel ready, for through a structured and focused practice.

A free mini-personal growth journal accompanies this lesson to help you further reflect on your changes and growth. (A link to download the journal is below.)

TIMESTAMP:

0:00    Welcome.
0:33    Introduction.
2:15    Facing the pain.
7:08    Understanding grief and sorrow.
10:05   Emotions.
14:40   We aren't prepared for loss.
18:44    Letting go of regrets.
24:45   Feeling okay.
27:56   Last thoughts.

BOOKS (by Vonne Solis)
Lessons in Surviving Suicide – A Letter to My Daughter
Divine Healing Transforming Pain into Personal Power – A Guide to Heal Pain From Child Loss, Suicide and Other Grief
The Power of Change

RESOURCES (Blog, Course & Meditations)

COURSE Discount

Subscribe to the podcast! Share your favourite episodes! Connect with Vonne on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Transcript

Vonne Solis  0:00  
Welcome to another episode of Grief Talk. Everything you want to know about grief and more. I'm your host, Vonne Solis. As an author, life transformation coach, online instructor and bereaved mom since 2005, I'll be bringing you great content that is informative, inspiring and practical. Whether you have suffered a loss or other adversity, stay tuned and tapped in as I cover a variety of topics to help you get where you want to go on your journey to heal and grow.

Vonne Solis  0:33  
Okay, so, welcome to another episode of Grief Talk Everything you want to know about grief and more. I am your host, Vonne Solis. And in these episodes, I'm starting, I have got a bit of a variety show on this podcast, where I interview guests who share their stories to inspire others. I have personal coaches on to talk about different practices that they work with that can help my audience viewers and listeners. I do coffee chat episodes, where I share bits and pieces about my own story of my own life and how I have dealt with and learned from my bereavement as a mom who lost her child to suicide in July 2005. My daughter Janaya took her life 17 years ago, and needless to say, it has been a struggle for me. And instead of deciding to just hold all that pain within and do nothing with it, very quickly after my loss, I decided I didn't want to allow her her death and her choice to leave the planet to feel like a mistake to me, my family or anybody. There's a lot of stigma attached to a suicide. And that coupled with losing my child, literally, literally living with knowing that my child chose to die,  that has been one of the biggest challenges I have faced in terms of allowing myself to fully heal. 

Vonne Solis  2:15  
So it's all of the experiences and the lessons that I have learned and I'm continuing to learn along my journey to fully heal, if that's even possible. It's a goal, but I'm not saying I'm going to completely achieve it, which would mean fully accepting the loss experience and all that that entails. So in the meantime, it's enough for me to have it as a goal. And that keeps me work, you know, basically moving forward, not pushing myself. But just moving forward in a way that I feel is comfortable for me. Sometimes pushes me a little bit because I think that it as they say, when you're too comfortable, you're not growing.

Vonne Solis  3:04  
But understanding all of the trauma and the incredible pain that is associated with certain losses and certainly child losses, sorry, certainly child loss is one of those, I discovered many years after my struggle in grief, not to pretend that it wasn't okay, but more pushing the pain away, that it is actually better and healthier for us to face our pain.

Vonne Solis  3:39  
So I've done a lot of things over the years, mostly as a healing practitioner that I worked one on one with people from 2006 until 2015. And during that period I wrote my first book, Divine Healing, Transforming Pain into Personal Power. And since then I've written two other books, The Power of Change, and most recently, the one published last year is Lessons in Surviving Suicide, A Letter to My Daughter.

Vonne Solis  4:11  
With the background with my background in working very closely with angels since 2006, working as a healing practitioner, writing, having many many messages channeled to me from the angels and my daughter and just life experience. Having a background and foundation really in a spiritual practice and a definite desire to always be exploring more than the physical. So a metaphysical curiosity for sure since my mid 20s. All of that compounded has allowed me today to share and be confident in what I know and what I teach and how I inspire. And recently starting this podcast, deciding to use this as my platform to do a variety of things, which going back to what I originally said is speaking with others as guests, having my coffee chats, which is just a sharing of my story and things I've gathered along the way. Doing some soul sister Sunday chats with my actual sister, where we'll be having more spiritual, metaphysical discussions about certain topics related to what's going on in the world, and how we can keep ourselves centered within all of the chaos. If we even, you know, choose to view the world as chaotic. And more recently deciding to do some coaching sessions using this podcast platform.

Vonne Solis  4:37  
So this is the first coaching coaching session I'm offering folks, because I do have an online school. And I did launch my first course last year called Beyond, well, actually earlier this year, called Beyond Bereavement - Get Me Started. And while that is probably something that is a little bit new for people to understand. What? A course how to how to get out of bereavement? Because I certainly haven't seen anything like it. Again, I always say just because I haven't seen it doesn't mean it's not there. I just haven't seen it. So I created my own. And, and as a means to help people sort of become aware and understand of the impact of so many life experiences that leave us in pain with grief, one of the staples in terms of messaging of this podcast is going to be that grief is not solely related to human loss. Which culturally we're trained to believe that is the case.

Vonne Solis  7:08  
So understanding we can be in enormous grief leaving something behind. A career. A lifestyle. You know, like moving. Kids leaving home. You know, there's numerous, numerous, like you know, choices that we make that even though we know that it's the time to make them, we can long and pine for them. And grief is really about you know, feeling an intense pain. It is related to loss and feeling very, very sorrowful and painful about that loss. And it turns into something that becomes much more complicated when we literally can't get over the experience.

Vonne Solis  7:18  
So focusing just on you know, understanding, we can be left with any number of situations: dysfunctional childhoods that leave us feeling very, very sorrowful for the child we were and what we endured. That is another form of grief we carry into adulthood, if not trauma in some cases. But leaving this just to grief, so in order to allow ourselves to even begin to move forward, I took a look at myself. And I have met countless bereaved parents over the years. Rest assured, there are fewer bereaved parents in this world than there are parents who are enjoying wonderful experiences with their living children. They're living children out living their parents. Which is again culturally, we are expected and and sort of conditioned to believe that is the right way of living. And if your child dies before you, well, that's just this is just very, very hard for most people to accept and it terrifies parents. And as they say over and over and over again, it's the worst loss to bear.

Vonne Solis  9:20  
So having found myself, not only in that situation, oh my God, I'm experiencing the worst loss that no other parent wants, along with, of course, thousands of others. But when it's your experience, you feel like it's your experience and nobody else is going through it. And having to overcome all the feelings related to that. And especially when it's a child suicide. My daughter was 22 but nevertheless having your child at any age you are as the parent and any age your child having them choose to leave the planet, we go through the same pain.

Vonne Solis  10:05  
So having met a number of bereaved parents over the years and talking and when we're comfortable with each other, which we almost always are instantly, and going, Oh, well, do you feel this? Do you feel that? And yep, yep. So over I'm confident enough 17 years in now to share what I'm going through, as not necessarily the status quo. But understanding I'm for sure not the only one feeling this. We might be having different physical experiences, but what we feel inside, you know, even though we'll feel it to different intensity and at different times, and maybe not exactly the same emotions, but similar, and so on, and so forth, we all are human beings with the same range of emotions. How we tap into them, what we experience, how we deal with them, how we overcome them, how we manage them, how we turn them around, flip them to be more positive, all of that there are countless ways to experience that. But in the end, anger is anger. You know, pain is sadness is sadness. Joy is joy. Happiness is happiness. You know, regret is regret. You know, feeling like a failure is failure. Not loving ourselves is, is, you know, we either do, we don't.

Vonne Solis  11:19  
So you know, what I'm saying when none of us are making up these emotions, and designing them uniquely specific to us. Our brains are wired to and our bodies are wired to react to to all of them similarly. As I said, different different ranges of them in intensity. But similarly, we're going to be, if we're mad we're mad you know. So point being is that looking at that, and actually, you know, working with a therapist at the time who gave me a list of emotions, and it was maybe a couple of pages long, but in very small font, and I looked at that list from A to Z, and I went, you know what? The negative emotions are just so much more. There are I should say, the negative emotions, there are so many more negative emotions than positive ones. It's it's making me wonder what we're actually wired to be experiencing, if not conditioned to be experiencing.

Vonne Solis  12:24  
So whenever I wanted to write about something specifically, when I was writing a letter to Lessons in Surviving Suicide, A Letter to My Daughter, I wanted to cover as many, you know, emotions as I could that were basically, I felt, preventing me from allowing myself to heal. To get out of this cycle that is too complicated to explain here, but was a cycle that was really quite negative. And while on the outside, yes, I was doing very well, and I could function quite well. And certainly helping others was like, way easier than digging deep into my own painful, you know, emotions, and really what what they can do to your your body, and sometimes I honestly think little bits of our DNA can change. I don't know about that. But that's what it felt like to me. So that took about two and a half years to go through all that. And, and I came up with a range of, of what I believe, across the board a lot of us do in a lot of situations, to prevent ourselves from living life to the fullest.

Vonne Solis  13:41  
So I thought, in this first coaching episode that I would go through a of at least the first I'll introduce you to the second, but certainly the first lesson of the 13. There are way more in my book, but I narrowed my online course down to 13 that I thought could apply to most people trying to well, for sure overcome, you know, the worst of their grief. If you're bereaved, you're always going to be bereaved. But you don't necessarily have to be experiencing the grief to the same negative intensity the more you're living with the experience. So the course is all about teaching people to integrate it into their life in a really, really beautiful, gentle, positive way.

Vonne Solis  14:40  
Looking at grief again, as well, hey, that's only for people who have lost a human being and I haven't done that yet, and it is true culturally we are absolutely not prepared for loss. There's no training out there to say now here's what you do if so and so dies. If you lose your grammy or grandpa, here's how this is going to feel and this is what you're going to do. If you lose your parents, if you lose a sibling. God forbid, if you lose a child. There is absolutely, to again to my knowledge, nothing out there to prepare us for what that would be like. And I guess I understand that. So my very, very first experience with grief, I've had plenty more since my daughter died, but my very first experience with grief was losing my daughter. So I fell in the pool with the sharks. And man did it eat me up.

Vonne Solis  15:34  
So fast forward to launching my online course and now considering doing in the near future one on one coaching again, with people, I decided, well, in the meantime, because my goal has always been to reach as many people as I could reach, without taxing my own health or energy too much. Because I've had to really manage my health quite carefully, I thought, why not share some coaching on the Grief Talk podcast platform. And that's just what I'm going to do.

Vonne Solis  16:10  
So for those of you that are interested, I'm going to put a link below so that you can download the first what I created as a PDF download, that is a think of it as a little bit little mini personal growth journal, and one that you can build and make on your own either electronically or by downloading the PDF. And it gives you a very small snippet of the very first lesson on the in the online course about regret. And some an exercise to complete at the end of it. And it is part of that exercise and part of that lesson that I wanted to share with you today. 

Vonne Solis  16:59  
I'm also just going to remind folks straight up here that anybody that chooses to do this, and really likes the information and what they're getting, you know, from even just the snippets I'm going to share with you, I am offering a 50% discount on this course. So it's priced at about $124.50 USD for with the 50% discount for people that want to go this a little bit further and dig in and take the full course at your own speed, of course. But in the meantime, just to introduce people and work at it just on your own with these coaching episodes. Each time, I'm going to be giving you the opportunity to sign up if you haven't yet, and get the first lesson. And then once you're in my email community, I will be

Vonne Solis  18:02  
emailing the PDF to the folks who are already signed up so you don't have to download it again. And what I want you to think about when should you do that in listening to the podcast episode here when it when I get to this part imminently here, is pause it. Pause it when you're thinking about the exercise, and about what I'm about to say and and just think about it. And the thing is, you can revisit the form, keep a blank one, make a duplicate, you can go back and and fill in your answers differently every time you feel a bit stronger and want to look at that a little bit differently. 

Vonne Solis  18:44  
So getting right to it and and looking at regret. The two main points in the lesson are: that in order to let go of regrets, you must be willing to rethink your beliefs and you must let it be okay to feel okay.

Vonne Solis  19:03  
Now, on the first point, be willing to rethink your beliefs, my course is all about over the 13 lessons, teaching you exactly how to change your mindset. So again, whether you're in bereavement from a human loss, or you're just stuck in life and you want more, the course basically teaches the same thing.

Vonne Solis  19:24  
So getting stuck in regret. I could probably talk considerably longer about my own regrets I had for years and years and years after my daughter took her life. She was 22. And when Janaya decided to die and I had had what in my mind was a perfect family, it and because there was no note and even if there was a course I wouldn't share her reasons, but there was no note. There was just simply no explanation for the choice of suicide. And at some point in the future, I've written about this, but in my books and blog, Good Griever blog, I'll put a link to that too, but you know, it's not, we can't culturally let ourselves off the hook by saying every single person that chooses suicide, they were they were mentally nuts. You know, they were mentally ill or nuts. You know? It's not that simple.

Vonne Solis  20:25  
And psychiatrists, and therapists are starting to understand that. We're not really, and they've told me that. They're, it's unpredictable, you do what you can as either a medical professional trying to assist, and certainly certainly, as parents, we really try and and loved ones. Spouses. There are plenty of spouses that that end their life and siblings and parents and you know, nobody, nobody is immune from a, a loved one being at risk of suicide. So it is unpredictable for every single person. And as I've said before, and I've written about, every single suicide is a shock to every loved one left behind. Every friend left behind. Every colleague, every family member, you know, and so on. Every medical professional So the point being is I don't want to talk about that here, what I want to talk about is we're all left with regret. 

Vonne Solis  21:23  
So if we're talking about it in in terms of death of a loved one, well, there's plenty of regrets to go around, you know? Should have been there. Should have done should have would have could have all of that. Too numerous to go into detail here and it will be unique and an individual for every single one of us. But what isn't unique is the regret. 

Vonne Solis  21:45  
So when I thought long and hard about this in terms of writing Lessons in Surviving Suicide, and I explored deeply, a lot of tears, I shed a lot of tears. But I was really looking at the core of my being. And understanding, it wasn't about fixing every single regret, it was about letting go of the regrets I could let go of that day and moving forward. And some may be bigger, well not maybe. Some are too big for me to let go of right now. So I'm not going to let them go. And I'm going to let it be okay that I can't let them go. But things like that I felt I could let go of regrets, again, to numerous, numerous to explain here that I could let go of I let them go.

Vonne Solis  22:43  
And one of the things that my therapist at the time was talking to me a lot about is you did the best you could with the knowledge you had at that time. And again, well, it sounded kind of simplistic for me, and no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I learned a lot in therapy at that time about the self critic. So I want you to just be aware of that. Because not everybody chooses to go to therapy. Not everybody gets an ace therapist, and and not everybody will do the work that, you know, normally you will get from working with a therapist. The idea of going to therapy is to actually work on yourself and get better. And not everybody has the money to go to therapy. So while I'm not sharing the therapist's session here, what I'm what I'm sharing is that through working with various therapists at different times in in my earlier bereavement, and gaining from it what I could and going you know what, yeah, maybe I am a little hard on myself. So the regrets go very much hand in hand in my in my view, and certainly in my experience with the harsh self-critic I was about my failures. 

Vonne Solis  23:57  
Lesson Two is all about failures, are they your friend or foe, but today just focusing on regrets, it's about whether or not we're in a space, even in a mindset to be able to look back at them and be willing to even let one go. So in order to do that, and in order to change your mindset, you have to be willing to think differently. And again, my course teaches that where I'll teach all the steps in in shifting, shaping your mindset to be a more positive one. But for now, just saying I am willing to think differently, opens the door to that. 

Vonne Solis  24:45  
The second point I want to make about letting it be okay to feel okay. Now, in some ways, this was a little bit of a woke culture and I'm not mocking woke culture. I'm just saying born, it was born more publicly, I feel from that a couple of years ago, certainly maybe in the pandemic, or just prior to the pandemic. And letting it be okay to show your feelings to have bad feelings, and so on and so forth. But on the flip side of that, when you're really hurting and suffering, letting yourself be okay? Again, tied to all the regrets, is something that can be very, very challenging. Because if we allow ourselves to feel and be okay, or successful, we are doing what we love, we're living a passion, purpose-driven life. We're happy, we're content, etc. We've got material security, we feel safe, we're moving on. That can feel really like a betrayal to certainly when we're talking about grief from losing a loved one to that loved one who has died. And in many ways, if it's not related to a loved one's death, and certainly a child's death, you I've met many, many, many, many parents who don't want to allow themselves to feel feel okay, because they're tied to too much guilt and regret to the death of of their their child. And they basically blame themselves for that death. And of course, I've been no different. Taken on huge blame for the choice my child to die, and feeling I wasn't there enough for her.

Vonne Solis  26:33  
But again, sticking to the regrets. So when you look at that regret and it's not related to a human loss, it might be that you don't have enough self-love to allow yourself to feel okay. And that might be tied to a lot of regret to choices you made at whatever age you cognitively started to be fully aware of the life you were shaping, which turned out to be perhaps not the one you really wanted. I dive into all of that throughout the lessons, and I'm going to be touching on that in each of the 13 that I'm going to be mini-coaching you with again on this podcast, Grief Talk. But for the moment, just to be aware of tapping into the idea of I can be okay. Huh, what would life look like if I allowed myself to feel and be better, and most importantly, just feel okay.

Vonne Solis  27:37  
Just food for thought. And again, I'm going to end on that note, because this download PDF will go through a little bit more, and give you the opportunity, asking you to think about the regrets that you're willing to let go of today. That's all you need to do.

Vonne Solis  27:56  
Again, I'll put that link down below. And thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. I'll be delving into these topics on the regular coffee chat solos too. So, don't feel like you missed out anything here or perhaps I didn't say enough. This is just to get your mindset thinking on a different level, depending of course, what experiences you're coming from. Some are coming from much more difficult experiences than others. But no matter where you are in your life, as long as you want a better one, there's room for us to rethink our beliefs so that we can grow. Until next time, thanks for watching. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai