I Thought Grief Was for Weak People

It took me five years to figure out what I was running from

I've buried a wife and daughter. My first wife died by suicide. And three years ago, I lost my daughter at nineteen. I'm not telling you this to set a mood or earn your trust with a sad story. I'm telling you because it's the truth, and because what happened after each loss is what this post is actually about.

When my wife Cindy died, I thought grief was for weak people. The weak can lie on the couch and cry because the strong are busy taking care of the things they can’t.

So, instead of grieving, I put it behind me. I got on with the business of building a new life. I moved to a new town, started a new job, and remarried. I seemed functional as hell and people often remarked on my strength.

I was also drinking every single day. Heavily. I was lying about, embarrassing myself and hating myself because I felt too pathetic to stop. What I couldn’t see, not for a single day of those four and a half years, was what the drinking was actually for.

When I finally hit bottom and stopped, nothing changed. I got sober and waited. Four or five months later, something I wasn't expecting started to happen. I started visiting her grave more often. I wrote about her. I felt the intense pain of sadness, regret and loss. I thought I was losing my mind. It turned out I was grieving her death had started healing. After five long years.

And here’s the thing I still find incredible: the entire time I was drinking, it never once occurred to me that I was drinking to avoid that pain. Not a single time. I was making that choice every single day, and every single day it made perfect sense. Not because I was weak. Because I had no idea I was avoiding anything at all.

That's what your psychological protection system does. It doesn't feel like protection. It feels like the only reasonable option.

That's not a drinking story. That's a protection story. And once I understood what had been driving it, I started seeing it in men everywhere. Men who were still functional, still holding things together, still telling everyone they were fine, doing what made complete sense to them every single day, with no more awareness of what was underneath it than I'd had.

That's exactly what I built Leading Through Loss to address.

There’s a particular kind of man who finds his way to this work.

He’s still functional. He’s still holding things together. From the outside he looks like someone who handled it. He went to the funeral, kept his job, and didn’t fall apart in the ways that would concern people. He’s still providing, still showing up to the things he’s supposed to show up to, and still keeping the machinery of his life running.

But he’s not engaged the way he used to be. The people closest to him can feel it and some of them have said so. He can feel it too. He’s present in the room and absent from the conversations that matter most. He’s doing the things a good man is supposed to do and feeling nothing while he does them. And no matter what he tells himself, no matter what the people who love him say, he can’t seem to find his way back.

He's not looking for permission to fall apart. He's tried harder than anyone knows. What he's looking for is the reasons why he can't get back into his own life. He’s looking to make sense of what's been happening to him.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then.

The pulling back, the checking out, the performance of fine, none of it was weakness and none of it was random. It was a system. A protection system that was running long before the loss and got turned all the way up by it. And you can’t push through a protection system on willpower, because it was built specifically to survive that.

What you can do is see it clearly. All of it, in your own words, on a page in front of you. Where it came from, what it’s been protecting, and what it’s been costing you.

That’s what Phase 1 does. It doesn’t fix anything. It makes the invisible visible. And for a man who has spent months or years not being able to explain what’s been happening to him, that turns out to be the only thing that actually feels like progress.

I’m launching Leading Through Loss today.

Phase 1 is a guided, self-paced process that takes less than two hours. No calls, no scheduling, and no performing for anyone. You work through it on your own time, in your own space, and you walk away knowing, maybe for the first time, exactly what’s been driving your behavior since the loss and why you haven’t been able to stop it.

It’s $199.

Phase 2 opens to Phase 1 graduates only. That’s where the work of actually dismantling what Phase 1 identified begins. You can’t get there without this.

If you’ve been reading this and recognizing yourself, I built this for you.