Unpacking The Emotional Toll: A Deep Dive Into Divorce Grief With Grief Coach, Shelby Forsythia

In this emotional episode of the Journey Beyond Divorce Podcast, host Karen McMahon dives deep into the complex emotions of divorce grief with expert guest Shelby Forsythia, a grief coach, author, and founder of Life After Loss Academy. Together, they explore the often-overlooked and multi-layered grief that accompanies the end of a marriage and how it impacts individuals during and after divorce.

Shelby shares her personal journey through grief, starting with the loss of her mother in 2013, and how this transformed her approach to loss and healing. She reveals how unresolved grief from past losses, such as the death of a loved one or the dissolution of a marriage, can resurface during difficult transitions, like divorce. In this episode, Shelby offers practical strategies for divorce recovery, including mindfulness tools, personal stories, and the importance of setting emotional boundaries with unsupportive loved ones.

The discussion also covers how societal perceptions often ignore the grief that comes with divorce and why it’s essential to acknowledge and process these emotions to move forward. Shelby provides actionable steps to help those grieving during divorce find peace, build resilience, and rebuild a fulfilling life.

Shelby Forsythia (she/her) is a compassionate grief coach and the creator of Life After Loss Academy, a powerful online course and community that supports individuals through life transitions such as divorce, death, and diagnoses. Featured in Huffington Post, Bustle, and The Oprah Magazine, Shelby has made it her life’s work to help others embrace grief as a teacher and create meaningful lives after major loss.

Connect with Shelby:

• Free Workshop: shelbyforsythia.com/free-workshop
• Life After Loss Academy: shelbyforsythia.com/life-after-loss-academy
• Facebook: facebook.com/shelbyforsythia
• Instagram: instagram.com/shelbyforsythia
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shelbyforsyth
• YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCo34-FLEEdl7JSdzGisfr3w

Journey Beyond Divorce Resources:

• Follow JBD on Instagram: @journey_beyond_divorce
• Book a Free Rapid Relief Call: http://rapidreliefcall.com

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Listen to the Podcast here

 

 

Unpacking The Emotional Toll: A Deep Dive Into Divorce Grief With Grief Coach, Shelby Forsythia

In this episode, we're talking about unpacking the emotional toll, a deep dive into divorce grief. You've experienced the pain of divorce. It's a season that can leave us lost, alone, overwhelmed, and you're not alone. We're delving into how often grief isn't acknowledged during divorce and how it can manifest in unexpected ways that take us by surprise, affecting our relationships, our self-esteem, even our overall well-being.

With me is an expert in this field. It is Shelby Forsythia. She's a Compassionate Grief Guide and an Author. Shelby's the Founder of Life After Loss Academy, and the Host of Dear Grief Guide Podcast and has dedicated to her life to helping others navigate the complex journey of grief. She also has some books that she'll talk about. With no further ado, welcome Shelby.

Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be back, Karen.

Yeah, it's good to have you. Before we dive in so that our readers can maybe get a little bit more flavor of who you are, could you share something that you've done in your life that you're most proud of?

Meet Shelby Forsythia: Grief Guide And Author

This is funny. We were talking about astrology before we started, but this might be my Leo self talking and Leos are considered very prideful and very extroverted and flair for the dramatic. My immediate answer is like, “There's actually a lot of things that I'm proud of,” which I think is the opposite answer that a lot of people would have.

I think there's like different categories of being proud for me, and I don't know if this is true for you or for people who are watching or reading, but there's pride for surviving. There's pride for accomplishing and then there's pride for just finding joy in being alive. Pride for surviving would fall under grief space for me, which I know is what we're here to talk about.

Being proud of myself for finding ways that worked for me to get through the loss of my mother, the death of my best friend, the death of my cat, but also the breakup of an engagement that really wracked my life. I didn't feel proud in the moment, but it's a pride that comes with looking back and being like, “I’ve made it through,” and not just survived, but actually, in a few really important ways, managed to take care of myself within the surviving.

There's pride with accomplishment and nothing makes me prouder than being an author in this lifetime. I wanted to write a book at the age of five. I never thought it would be a grief book, I’ll tell you that. I thought it was going to be about ponies or fairies or unicorns to the point where I was up through middle school writing fantasy books about ponies and fairies and unicorns.

When my first self-published book came out in 2019 and it was on grief, I'm like, “I guess I'm a published author, but this isn't how I pictured it looking.” Pride came in through the back door, I guess you could say, but accomplishing things like that that you've always wanted to do in part of this life. The third category for me, pride through simply being alive or finding joy in this lifetime in a world that can feel very dark and heavy a lot of the time. It's like these blips of pride or these blips of joy of putting myself out there or trying a new thing or starting before I'm ready. An example of this is I joined a queer jazz band here in Chicago and we did a gig at a swing dance club.

I have not danced since high school. There was a moment where the director was like, “We've got multiple pianists, we've got multiple instrumentationalist. They don't want us to be too loud in this space. If you're not playing an instrument, go dance.” It was one of those when life gives you an invitation, you have the option whether or not to take it. That night I took it and it was the happiest I had been in a very long time. It was about two weeks after the presidential election here in the United States when everything felt very dark and heavy.

I think a lot of people, especially here in a big city like Chicago, big blue city like Chicago, were feeling the ache. To come together in a room where people were dancing and making live music and teaching each other and really receiving all the invitations that were being extended by hand or by dance or by foot on the dance floor was so much fun. That was like a small and wonderful fleeting pride that I had myself as saying yes to going out and dancing and I danced until midnight. It was wonderful.

The concept that comes to mind in that last piece of your story is surrender, that surrendering and accepting whatever the invitation is in front of us rather than resisting it. “I can't do that. I haven't danced in a long time. I'm not going to try that.” As you're talking, that surrendering to what we're invited to and stretching beyond our comfort zone in the moment is always so uncomfortable and scary. Your experience was so joyful and lovely, which it often is.

This relates to grief, too, but especially in a world that has now seen a pandemic, it's still really hard to trust people just generally. To look at your neighbor and know or believe, I guess, that they're good just as you are good. To be in a room full of people whom I'd never met, with the exception of the 15 people in the band, and to have 50 other people extending invitations in, metaphorically and literally, it was really can I surrender to trusting that whatever this experience is, it's going to catch me if I say yes to this, will I be supported in that? I think you're right. It has to do with surrender and resilience and a trust that no matter what happens, you'll be caught or land somewhere. Yeah, absolutely.

I love your different categories of pride too, so thank you so much for that.

Yeah, I love that question. I can't wait to hear others' answers now.

Me too. As we dive into this, it's complex and multidimensional, the entire concept of grief and especially when it comes to divorce. I'm just going to start where at this point where so many people, I was talking to a client and all of her loved ones are like, “Come on, let's get you on a dating app. Let's go out. It's the holidays, let's be jolly.” I want to start at this place where if you lose a loved one, grief makes sense. If you're going through a divorce, people don't necessarily welcome it as much or accept it as much. Grief isn't very comfortable. When it's not comfortable for the people around you, how do you deal with that? Let's just open up the conversation on those two fronts to begin with.

The Complexities Of Divorce Grief

Yeah, 1,000% the fact that divorce isn't really seen as a grief event in society and then the people around you don't know what the hell to do with it. I think one of the first things I teach my clients too. People, when they hear a grief coach, they think death of a loved one, but I tell people I work with the three Ds, death, divorce, and diagnosis, these three huge things that can change your life and breakups are included in that.

Also, the losses that often follow all of those things, geographic moves, financial loss, pet loss, miscarriage, like the things that are lesser acknowledged by society can also go in there too. Yeah, society often looks at divorce and they say, “The other person's still alive, so what's your problem?” It’s the overarching sentiment. It's not really said by a lot of people.

Some people do say it out loud and you're like, “That's a really rude thing to say.” In divorce, in the disillusion of something, even if the divorce was your idea or your instigation, there is something to grieve here. There is something that is ending. There is a threshold that you are crossing over that you cannot go back through. There's like a door that is sealed now that you can no longer access.

 

Even if the divorce was your idea, the disillusionment of something ending means there is something to grieve—a threshold crossed that you cannot go back through.

 

I think in divorce, there are so many things to account for when grieving. I think on the surface level people are like, “I'm grieving the relationship,” which is like, yes, you're grieving the relationship. Within that, though, and I'm going to miss a few, so apologies to anything that I miss in here, any other things that that people think of, I hope we'll hear from you because I know there's so much more to grieve than just what I'm going to list.

Here's what I’ve seen when working with clients. You grieve the relationship as an entity. You grieve who you were inside the relationship, the roles that you played or didn't get to play, the ways you played into maybe conflict or lack thereof. You grieve those same things for the other person in the relationship. I received a letter for Dear Grief Guide from somebody who was widowed and she said, “I'm not just grieving my husband, I'm grieving the father of my children, the protector of the household, the manager of the money, a fellow breadwinner.”

These are all roles that another person plays inside of a relationship that you could also potentially be grieving, especially around the holiday season. Who's the gift buyer? Who's the house cleaner? Who's the logistical organizer of when relatives are coming in and out of town? Who's the menu designer? Who's the tradition carrier honor? Who's the scrapbooker? Who's the family photographer? These are all like teeny, major, tiny, big roles in relationships that we either slide into because they're comfortable for us in a twosome in a relationship, or that we take on very consciously and say, “I am this person to my household.”

However, when you experience a divorce, the person who filled all those roles is no longer present. Those are all individual griefs worth grieving inside of the larger umbrella of I am grieving the relationship. You grieve the ways in which your life changes as a result of divorce. You become seen through different eyes by friends and family. You are not a person who's married. You're now a person who's divorced. If you're doing something like going on the dating market, it's different than maybe the first time you're on the market, both technologically and otherwise.

The scene which you're entering is different. It may impact you financially, especially if you're a woman or a non-binary person. These people are often more affected financially by divorce than men. There's just so many other ways in which your world and your future is impacted. If you share children together, you think about future events like weddings and graduations not being the way you'd picture them in your mind.

You may have to go back to school, find a different job, move neighborhoods, get a different car, decide who gets the family pet. There's so many negotiations of what life looks like now that continue on into the future that must be grieved in and under that umbrella. To the second part of your question, there's people watching you do this. For lack of better phrasing, you are being witnessed as you are grieving and processing and figuring out where to put the clutter emotionally of this new experience.

 

You are being witnessed as you grieve, process, and figure out where to put the emotional clutter of this new experience.

 

They're wondering why on earth you aren't happier or more productive or have more energy to get back out in the world again. The thing that we're not saying is whether or not I chose this, whether or not I signed on for this or instigated this, it is a grief event. I need a little time, a little tool, a little guidance from you or myself or anybody else to figure out where all this belongs. Now as I begin to pick everything up and begin to figure out who I am now, what my future looks like now, what I want, because desires and dreams often change as a result of a divorce because they're mine is one person now. Circumstantially, geographically, sometimes they're different. Yeah, you are just being observed and often cast through the lens of other people's judgment or criticism or analysis or like well-intentioned goodwill.

Sometimes clichés of you just need to get back on the horse again. The first step often is just taking a huge breath and being like, “This is a grief event,” and then letting yourself treat it as such. One of the exercises I teach inside of Life After Loss Academy is simply to call yourself a griever and take the lens, I call it like putting on your grief glasses, and to take your experience.

I am now a grieving person. You could say I'm now a divorced person. How do you see every element of the world through the lens of being a divorced person from tiny things? How do you cook dinner when you're divorced? How do you get the mail when you're divorced? How do you clean your house when you're divorced to, how do you go to a cocktail party when you're divorced?

How do you travel with family when you're divorced? How do you look for jobs when you're divorced? When you just add it as like a prepositional phrase to the end of every sentence, it really helps you acknowledge the weight of the impact that this has had on your life and will continue to in the future. It's not a bad thing. It's just you telling the truth about the fact that this is a grief event. Sometimes, doing that for yourself can help other people comprehend too.

A divorce is not something generally entered into on a whim. It's a big freaking deal. It makes sense that the impact of it would be big as well. Even saying that to friends and family, “This is not a decision me and former spouse entered into lightly. The impact is literally every facet of our lives. It helps me when you can see that too and recognize that.”

Beautiful description. It is so multidimensional and you hit on so many of the different parts of it. A lot of times, my clients will talk about how the saying is death and divorce, death being number one. So many of them are like, “No, divorce and death,” because it's so multidimensional and especially if the other person is still in your life and it's difficult in other ways. Just that whole not seeing the children as often as you see the children being worried about how they are at mom or dad's house because you're concerned about their behavior. It's so big.

There are your loved ones who. I would love for you to talk about this. There are two different avenues I want to go down. The first one is the loved ones who love you and they're really bringing their own baggage to the table and they're not comfortable with your sadness or your pain. As you said, things can be said that are so unhelpful during that period of time. If somebody's in that space, they're leaning on their family and they know their family or their friends, their best friend, whatever loves them. Yet, the way they're responding to their emotional experience of grief is not helpful. What are some suggestions that you can give the reader?

Navigating Friendships After Loss

I'm so glad you brought this up. It is my most popular workshop that I teach ever. I taught it six times in 2024. All the things I taught and teach, this is the most requested. It's a workshop called How to Negotiate Friendships after Loss. Loss Includes, again, death, divorce, diagnosis, but anything you can define as a major loss in your life. I came up with this framework of the eleven toxic grief tropes. This is from eight years of working with clients and hearing how their friends and family responded. Of course, having my own experiences too. I’ve categorized the ways people talk about our grief into eleven categories. I won't name them all for you here, but I’ll give you some common examples, especially for divorce. They're cheeky or silly names.

The reason I categorize them this way is so you can take stock. I encourage people to make lists of people they interact with on a daily basis and say, “My cousin, whoever, is this type of toxic grief trope or my aunt, whoever, is this type and my best friend says this and my coworker says this.” You can really identify, “I'm being hurt by this, but what exactly about what they're saying is harmful or hurtful?”

There's the rose colored reframer, which is the person like, “Everything happens for a reason. They see the silver. You're meant for greater things. You'll find the love of your life again. He just wasn't the love of your life.” They have jumped to making positive meaning from your loss before you're ready. That's one type. There's the judgmental jerk, which comes up a lot in divorce and breakups of they're judging your grief through their lens of, “It's been six months, why aren't you over it already?”

They went off the top of the list.

Bean counters. These people are counting the days, counting the months and they're like, “It's been two years. What's the deal? Why are you still so upset by that? Why are you still worried about your kids? Why are you still worried about living arrangements? Why haven't you started dating?” There's the distractors, there's a D word in front of that. I can't remember what it is right now, but there's like the driven distractors which are the, “You just need to get out of the house,” people who are like, “You just need to go on some dates. You just need to put yourself out there. You just need to find a hobby.” They believe that busyness will cure grief, which it does not, which is really frustrating.

 

Many believe busyness will cure grief, but it does not.

 

This is true. I see for a lot of people who get divorced within circles of married couples, the disappointing disappear. The person who may show up for you once or twice and then absolutely ghost themselves out of your life. It's really disappointing. It's really frustrating and heartbreaking because a lot of people in divorce communities, similar to widow communities or child loss communities, say things like, “It's like they think my loss is contagious, like my divorce could somehow happen to them if I stand too close.”

There's this sense of being ostracized by a person or by a group, that's really frustrating. I have eleven of these and going through this exercise with people and saying, “Which of these things are you seeing show up most in your life?” My number one hated trope is the rose colored reframer. I hate when people try and cheer me up. I'm like, “Just let me be sad. For five minutes, just let me be sad.”

The second part of that is noticing if there's anyone or anywhere in your life that offers you any helpful things. Whether they drop groceries off at your house, whether they call you every Friday, whether or not they actually talk is another thing. They might just be checking on you. Whether they offer to pick up your kids or get your mail or take on a project for you at work, whatever the case may be. Listing out behaviors that are actually helpful to you or feel supportive.

For people who've lost loved ones, a lot of times, it's like they remember my grief anniversaries. They ask about my person who died. They bring me food, they hold me when I cry. The list goes on and on. For divorces, it's often like they remember that this is something I'm going through. They offer to take the extra ticket at graduation and sit with me in the place where my wife would've sat. They remember the date of my divorce and that it's a weird season for me.

They offer to hang up Christmas lights outside the house during the holidays because they know that's a role that I'm grieving that my husband used to play. All of these positive actions are the counterbalance to the negative ones. You approach people. I'm going out of order, but we categorize people as green light, people who are always supportive. Yellow light, people who are unpredictably supportive. Sometimes they say shitty things and sometimes they sell helpful things and then they're red light people who just don't understand what it is to be grieving what you're grieving and have no compassion for what you're going through.

For the most part, the yellow light people are the people that you can repair relationship with. I present a script in this little mini course, and you can find this also in Life After Loss Academy. It's one lesson out of the many that I teach in there of, insert person's name here, “Last time we interacted, you told me it was time to suck it up and get on some dating apps so I can start to move forward with my life. That made me feel,” so using person first language, “I felt or that made me feel,” as opposed to you did this, which is finger pointy and not well received most of the time.

I’t made me feel like I wasn't allowed to grieve the fact that that I'm divorced even if it was my decision and that a new relationship can heal me from my pain, which is not true. New relationships are just new relationships. They're not magical Band-Aids for anything.” If you feel spicy, you can put that in. New relationships aren't magical Band-Aids. They're really just adding another person to your life, which can be a whole source of other stress.

You can offer some sympathy or compassion. “I know you hate seeing me in pain. I know you want to make me feel better. I know this is hard for you to watch. It's hard for me to. In the future, it would be helpful if you,” and then insert any of the helpful behaviors that you love. “I would love if we could talk every Friday. I would love if I could reach out to you when I am ready to do something like this.” Maybe even setting a boundary. “I would love if you could help me pick up the kids or take on a project at work. If you could come over and we could cook together or we could play games online,” if they're far away, if they're not able to be in contact. “If you could just ask how I'm doing every once in a while and just let me guide the conversation and then see what they say.”

The last part of this that I always teach is don't just send the script. You’ve got to form an action plan for taking care of yourself in the aftermath because there's three ways this could go. What to do if they respond well, “Thank you so much. I didn't realize I was putting so much pressure on you,” etc. What to do if they respond back, “I'm just trying to make you feel better. You deserve a love of your life and I can't believe you don't want to get back on the horse again.” Making a plan for what to do if they respond badly. Oftentimes, it involves distancing yourself from the person or having family members or friends act as go-betweens for a little while or what to do if they don't respond at all.

Sometimes text messages don't go through. Sometimes people aren't reading their emails, sometimes people don't check their mail if you send a snail mail boundary through a letter or sometimes people don't listen to their voicemails. What will you do if the person doesn't respond at all? Finally, how will you take care of yourself after setting the boundary or sending the script in their direction?

What a lot of people don't recognize, especially with grief or divorce, they sometimes recognize it for death, but especially not with divorce, is that it takes so much of your precious energy, which you do not have a lot of when you're grieving, to figure out what you need, what you don't need, and then to ask for it because all of that is very vulnerable. The resources I often recommend are Nedra Glover Tawwab book Set Boundaries, Find Peace. She has some wonderful tremendous scripts for setting boundaries in all kinds of circumstances.

She also has another book, I believe, called Drama Free. It's about setting boundaries inside of intimate relationships. It's just a wonderful collection of words to actually construct the architecture of relationships that you're in. Something I always emphasize with grieving people is you are not setting boundaries to be cruel. You set boundaries because grief has changed you. People are like, “I don't want to be changed by grief.” I'm like, “I would be surprised if grief didn't change you.” I would be more upset and more offended if this loss did not make you a different person because that is the nature of grief. You have been changed by loss, you have been changed by divorce, you have been changed by grief.

 

You set boundaries because grief has changed you.

 

That now changes your rules of engagement with everybody in your life. I know it's exhausting and I know you don't want it. You set boundaries because you want to continue to be in relationship with these people. You don't want to have to grieve their loss or their exit from their life or you cutting them off. You don't want to have another thing to grieve. You actually really want to stay invested in the relationship. You just need the terms and conditions to change a little bit.

If you want to phrase it that way, go ahead. You can say, “Friend, I know my divorce was 6 months ago, 2 years ago. It's still a big part of my life. I need the terms and conditions of our relationship to change.” If you want to use humor, you go right ahead. I find it works a lot for a lot of people. It is something that they're doing, but it's not necessarily personal. It's what society has taught us is true about coming back from a devastating loss like a divorce.

What society believes is true is another relationship can place your loss. If you stay busy, you can get rid of your grief or you won't even have grief at all. This is a very short time limited thing that happens in a tiny pocket of time and it never affects you again for the rest of your life. All those things just are not true. Our friends and our family, most of the time, I believe, are doing their best to help us, but they don't have what they need. Sadly, oftentimes, the burden falls on the people who are grieving to teach the people around them what to say and what to do. That's the easiest tool I have to help grieving people do that.

I’ve seen relationships die as a result of this. Grieving people will come back and say, “I have the clarity of knowing that they can never support me through anything hard because they have very clearly shown me they're not interested in growing in that direction with me. It's the direction I'm forced to grow because of loss.” I’ve seen relationships saved and repaired and even improved. No matter which direction it goes, the gift of this exercise is that where you stand with your friends and family members as opposed to perpetually living in this like enigma soup of sometimes they say helpful things and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they feel supported and sometimes they don't.

These little micro jabs are not big T trauma, but little T trauma and they add up over time. A lot of the times, people don't even know that they're hurting you. Saying, “Ouch, different words would be great or different actions would be great. Can you help me with this,” is a really great way to start those conversations.

Those are such great tips. It sounds like a wonderful course because also when you're grieving, you've got your own lens on that couldn't leave you being defensive, angry or snarky. Being given some, let's assume, best intention, but let's communicate clearly and set boundaries. It sounds perfect.

It reminds me, I did a workshop and there was somebody lovely from Canada who attended the call and my wife's from Canada and there's this trope and stereotype of Canadians being more polite than Americans. She told a personal story of her daughter died and it's been three months and her friends vanished, but then three months later, have started reappearing, but they're back to their usual sending memes and planning brunch and all this other stuff. She's like, “Is no one going to say anything that my daughter died? Is no one going to acknowledge how that's changed my life and I might not have the energy for brunch and memes might not be funny to me anymore? No one's saying anything.” I said, “I’ll give you two scripts. I’ll give you the Canadian version and the American version.”

I said, “If you want to be like me and you want to be very snitty and in the group chat, be like, ‘Is nobody going to mention that my daughter died? It's really wild to me that it's been just three months and you all are going back to making plans and stuff with no acknowledgement of how much energy I have or it's the holidays and I'm thinking of her.’” That would be great to send. The Canadian version of, “I’ve noticed the whole group's gone back to what we used to do, but I’ve changed as a person. Can we have a larger conversation about that?” They both ask the same thing, but one's more direct than the other. Yeah, you're right. Many people don't know what to say, but they also need to be called out a little bit.

It is a shame, and I will say this till the day I die, that grievers must do the job of educating the people around them. If you have the energy to do so, or when you decide you have the energy to do so, because I know the holidays are hard for everybody. A lot of people are like, “I'm setting that boundary in January. Right now, I am putting a happy face and trying to survive,” which is very valid. Once you do, the gift of that is clarity around your relationship and how that person or if that person is able to follow you into your life now with loss, life after loss.

Before I give you my next question, you have the most lovely, soothing voice. What a beautiful thing for being a grief coach. It's just so gentle, so soothing, so lovely.

I’ll tell you the best compliment I ever received. I did an event in 2019 right before COVID called the Bereavement Cruise. It's exactly what you think it is. You take a bunch of grievers and you put them on a boat for a week. We did a bunch of expert-led workshops and I got to be one of the experts. I ran ads on my podcast for six months leading up to it and saying, “I'm going on this cruise. If you want to learn from me in person, it'd be great to meet you,” because I know I have readers all over the world as I'm sure you do. This woman walks up to me and we'd never met before. She goes, “My name is Anne,” or whatever her name was. She's like, “I have to tell you something, but I'm afraid I'm going to insult you.”

I was like, “I don't know what this is about.” It could literally be anything. My life and my grief are on the internet and my face, it could be literally anything. She said, “I’ve been reading to your podcast for three years.” I was like, “Here we go.” She said, “Sometimes, I don't really listen. Sometimes, I fall asleep.” I was like, “That's the nicest thing you could have said.” She said, “My husband died two years ago and your voice is one of the only things that's been able to help me rest since he died.”

I was like, “That's the nicest thing you could have said in response to, ‘I might offend you.’” I have used that as such a grounding point going forward of what even a voice is able to do for people who are grieving. I know what I'm saying is helpful, but sometimes even just hearing a voice that sounds kind in the middle of everything.

A soft, kind, gentle voice, life changing. Absolutely. You have a voice made for grief coaching

Thank you very much. I never thought I'd be here. I never thought I'd write books about grief, but I spent my entire childhood taking voice lessons and doing musicals and this is where it's paid off. I never landed on Broadway, but I got here.

Grief Coaching And The Residue Of Past Losses

I want to look at another piece of grief that I’ve read about. Tell me if this is true in your perspective and elaborate. I heard that each time we grieve, we're also grieving all about past loss, especially if one didn't grieve. I had coached a woman once who came to me because she needed to end her relationship and leave her job and something else. Literally, within two sessions, it turns out that she was never allowed to grieve her father for a second when she was like six. She went through her whole life.

It was a big eye-opener for me. I think that most of my readers and clients are maybe in the 45 to 65-year-old category. There may have been other losses. Can you just talk about how grief works when either you haven't grieved past losses and if, in fact, it does one impact the other or does each grief have some residue from the grief before?

The Connection Between Grief And Physical Objects

I love that word. I’ve never heard the it framed as like grief carries residue with them into the future. I think that's very true. In a personal story from my own life, I was not always good at grief because I don't know that any of us are inherently good at grief. I pushed down the grief over my mother for about two years after her death. I did not become a grief coach until about six years after she died. Three to six years after she died is when I started training and reading. For the first two years after she died, I just knew I was mad and sad all the time. Mad, sad and exhausted. It was a divine trinity. I did not fully allow myself to feel the emotions of her life being no longer on this planet until my wallet got stolen.

I was working at a tea shop in downtown Chicago. I'd hung my bag on the back of a chair, which I know now you're never supposed to do in a major city. Someone just slipped their hand and took the wallet and walked away. I did not even know it was gone until I left. In that moment, I write about this in my first book, it's like I'd locked grief in the basement of my life and I was living on the ground floor. At nighttime, I would hear it howling and pacing and huffing around, but I would not allow it to come through that basement door because I was afraid of what I would find. I was sincerely concerned at the age of 23-ish, my mom died when I was 21, that if I felt the full extent of my grief, I would either be committed to a mental institution or I would die.

That's how intense it felt to me. I know that seems very dramatic if you've never grieved before, but I really, truly felt that the impact of my grief, I would not be able to contain it in my body. I had never had that feeling before. I'm like, “I'm just going to combust.” I’ll just explode. I have no other option. I just won't do this. I'd also never seen any other examples of it, even in movies and television and media and stuff. I'd certainly not seen it from real living people in my life. I really had not seen it modeled for me anywhere else. That day that the wallet was stolen, it was like the straw that broke the camel's back.

I slammed the door to my apartment closed. In losing something that was so precious and essential to my life, I was then grieving my mother, someone so precious and essential to my life. It was like the wallet was a trap door to grieving the death of my mother. I just sobbed and wailed and I was like slamming my fist on the floor. I put screamo music on. My neighbors must have thought I was going crazy. I can't really blame them. I am sincerely surprised to this day no one called the police because it was that loud and that violent what came rushing out of me. At the end of that experience, I was lying on my side on the floor of my apartment. This voice popped into my head and it said, “You just gave yourself permission to grieve.”

Expressing Grief Through The Body

I was like, “What is that? What does that mean? That was great. I didn't die.” I was so surprised I was still on planet earth. I was so surprised I didn't have a heart attack or cease or simply cease to exist. That's everything I thought would happen because I really did not know any better. Grief has this prone to all this magical thinking. I think you are right on the money that at any age, current losses unlock themes or residue or trauma or similar feelings from past losses, even if those losses are not death related losses. A lot of times I have heard some of my most heartbreaking stories from clients.

Oftentimes, people don't let themselves feel grief over a death until some physical object goes missing, such as a piece of heirloom jewelry or a Christmas ornament that can never be replaced or something is broken, for example, like a favorite photo or like an old sweatshirt finally wears out. It's like the last physical remnant of a person who was alive is now disintegrating or lost or gone. It's like the grief hits. I 1,000% agree that current losses and future losses can unlock losses from the past.

 

Oftentimes, people don't let themselves feel grief over a death until some physical object goes missing.

 

The flip side of that, if you want to reframe for it, is that everything that you learn from how to cope with old losses you can take with you into the future. I did a lot of grief for my mom alone and by myself because I didn't really want to share my pain with anybody. When my best friend died in 2022, so almost a decade after my mother died, she died from COVID very suddenly. My mom died from breast cancer very suddenly.

Very similar echoey losses. I was like, “Really? We're doing this again? F the universe. I'm so fed up.” In both cases, I was very close to the point of impact. I was not my mom's emergency contact, but I was living in the house when she died, it was over winter break. She died the day after Christmas. For my best friend, I was her emergency contact. Her entire family lived out of state. I was the person who got the call that she died. Very similar situation to my mother's death. In both cases, they each died within the course of seven days of receiving either hospital admission or a diagnosis. I was like, “All right, we're doing this again.”

In this case, I got together with a group of 8, 9, 10 of my closest friends who all knew her. She was in our circle of friends. We went to the pier out here on the beaches in Chicago because we are on the lake. We had a joint screaming session two days after she died. I know screaming's not for everybody, but having the expression of pain and wailing and grief come so close after the loss. As opposed to 2 years later, it's 2 days later. I was like, “We're getting this out of our bodies right now.”

It was pouring rain, it was beautiful. It was like the middle of May. Every single one of my friends came up to me and they're like, “I did not know I needed that. I thought if I felt something that big that I would surely die.” I'm like, “I know what that is too.” The wonderful thing about your losses coming with you is that you learn from each one what works for you in grief.

You can take those practices or tools or habits or meditations or teachers. Whatever you compile or draw closer to you as you're grieving, you can take things like that with you for future losses. You can also do this with like foods you love to eat or outfits you love to wear. I have people who have grief outfits. “Alright, I'm grieving again. I'm putting on the same uniform day after day.” I have some jumpsuits that I have and I'm like, “That's my grief outfit.” I have grief foods. I'm like, “These are my grief foods. These are my grief TV shows. These are my grief teas. These are my grief rituals. These are my grief books.” When people talk about comfort shows or comfort movies or comfort foods, a lot of what they're pointing to is, “I'm grieving and I need something that makes me feel home and whole.”

People just don't call it grief foods or grief outfits or anything like that. When I'm in the house in a body suit and sweats, I'm like, “I'm in my grief outfit. I'm doing the bare minimum to survive. It's also the comforting way to take care of myself.” I think you're definitely pointing to something. It's a shame, to your original point, that we live in a world where we can only know what we know when we know it, especially with regard to grief.

To be grieving a father that you lost at six, when you're grieving a divorce right now, you don't just grieve the divorce and you don't just grieve the father, you grieve not knowing differently, sooner. There's a lot of pain in that because you don't just see the divorce and the father, you see the breakup and the cross country move and the college graduation without your friend and the time that you were ostracized and the other breakup that you had and the time you were left out of this and you didn't get the promotion.

Grieving In The Aftermath Of Toxic Relationships

You see every other micro loss in your life too and not having the tools for that. All of those things are worth grieving in and of themselves. Also grieving, not having the tools or the resources or the community to know how to do that differently. I know this sounds like so much grief. People are like, “Shelby, you really bummed people out because you talk about big lists of all the things you got to grieve now.” Even sometimes saying that's a thing worth grieving is grieving.

You don't have to go to a therapy retreat or a grief cruise in order to process each and every one of these losses. Even looking back on that and saying, “I'm grieving that I didn't know better or didn't have better community or parenting when my dad died at six or more permission to express what I'm feeling.” Even saying that out loud is a beautiful permission slip to continue to carry that grief and notice it as you go forward into the future.

I want to share something with you. When you were talking about being on the beach, my mom passed very suddenly. We did not have a good relationship. I’ve actually barely shed a tear. It's like my dad died and I grieved for three years. My mom died and I'm still waiting. However, when you were talking, what I remember is I was in outside of St. Pete, Florida, and a friend of mine was doing a sound bath every Wednesday night. It's a brilliant musician, stunning sound bath. I think I had done one once before and it was weird. I laid down and the most amazing thing happened to me. Over the course of the hour, very quickly, as soon as the sound bath began, I had this wave of emotion.

My body started gyrating. I started crying and then I started laughing hysterically. I really had to say, “Just let go,” because my ego was like, “You probably look ridiculous. Stop.” I was like, “Just let go. Just be with it.” Almost for the entire hour, I must have looked crazy because I was crying, I was laughing, my body was like a snake on the ground. When it was all over, there was this incredible peace, like this cathartic, I just wanted to go home and lay down and go to sleep. I was exhausted, but I felt like I had been emptied out of so much frenetic energy of different types.

I call it the glass and the dishwasher feeling because when I wrote about the stolen wallet and the screaming and permission to agree, I felt like a clean glass that had gone through the dishwasher, but I didn't even know I needed to it. I really resonate with that. I think you point to something else too, and I hope that people who are divorced or in the process of divorcing or facing any other grief will read this too. Grief lives in the body and things that appeal to your body, whether they be dancing or going to a sound bath or being worked on by somebody, I'm thinking massage, body work, reiki, whatever appeals to you, playing contact sports, especially if you're more of a, “I’ve got to get it through some aggression,” type of body movement. These are all wonderful ways for grief to be expressed.

 

Grief lives in the body and things that appeal to your body.

 

I’ve seen people take up hula hooping. I’ve seen people take up like tai chi, yoga. I’ve seen grief come as through lines for all of these things. It offers you a different way of moving through a grief that's not just thinking about what you're feeling. Westernized society's really good at that. It's like, “Let's find some words or some frameworks or some tools and tips and reframes,” which is a great portion of the work that I do and I'm sure you do as well.

We're rewriting the story that you're telling yourself in your head about what's happening. There's also another component. My wife says that she would love to just be a brain on legs because maintaining bodies are so hard, but engaging your body with what's happening with your grief, too, can be extraordinarily helpful for moving it through, too, without the need to think about it or have words for it or define it or something else.

Especially for like yours, difficult relationships or relationships where maybe you ran out of words or there were never words in the first place, or the words were so rage or anger or hate-filled that they weren't productive. Maybe all you ever received were to was toxicity or pain. There's an article I wrote many years ago about grieving toxic people, abusers and assholes, which a lot of society thinks you should not grieve because shouldn't you be so happy that you're dead and rid of them. They're dead and you're rid of them or that you're out of the relationship and so you're rid of them.

One of my favorite people who talks about this is Sunny McMillan. She used to host a radio show called Sunny in Seattle, and she talks about her divorce from her toxic husband and how that was still a grief event for her. Yes, similar to everything else, you grieve the relationship, but you also grieve the person you were or who you thought you would be in this relationship, the person they were, who they said they would be, and then they turned into, or who they showed themselves to be.

Also, all the roles that you played to each other, positive, negative, and neutral in each of that, especially taking stock and looking back how life was supposed to go versus how it actually unfolded. There's so much of that you can say in words. There's also so much of that that simply just needs to be felt. That's a hard thing to do when you're living in Westernized society that loves words and moving through things as quickly as possible, not always tuned in with what's happening below neck level.

I’ve told this story a few times on my show. Many of my readers and clients are in very high conflict. It is the toxic person, the dysfunctional person that you're divorcing. For me, I struggled for years before I made the decision. It was three and a half years of a really high conflict divorce. I lived in the attic, lots of yelling, screaming. I pretty much was certain that there was no grief needed to happen. After it was all done and I was like, “Woo-hoo, it's all done,” really glad it was all done, out of the house. I had my own little place with the kids. I found myself sitting on the beach one day and I grew up on the beach. For me, going to the ocean is like going back to the womb.

I'm sitting on the beach and all of a sudden, I stop bawling my eyes out and rocking back and forth like a baby. Out of my mouth comes, “It wasn't supposed to be this way.” No one was more surprised than me. I'm like, “Where did this come from?” Yet, it was ready to bubble up and it was, I'm not going to say the last remnants, but remnants that I didn't even know. To your point, and I say this to everyone, it's like none of us stood before whatever that altar was and said, “Until death do we part,” with the expectation that we would be where we are. It's like the whole dream of what that was supposed to be and what we had hoped for, there's so much in there that we have to let go of and grieve.

Also, something I see too, especially when there's some flavor of toxicity at play, is I never thought I would be a person who would stay so long or abandon myself like this. We use extreme caution and sessions, not to turn this into some self-hatred, but there's this sense of I never thought I would try to stick it out like that or try to gloss over red flags or whatever the case may be. I never thought I would allow myself to sit in survival mode for so long or take so long to get out. I never thought I'd put up with that crap. There's this vision or this view that we have of ourselves of, “I can't believe I became that type of person who at first only belonged to other people.”

I mean this scientifically, but it is truly brain changing. There's another wonderful book. I'm sorry I'm just throwing resources at you, but there's a wonderful book called The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O'Connor. I believe she only speaks through the lens of losing a loved one to death. You might have to reconfigure some of the words and exercises to for divorce. She talks about when somebody significant to us goes missing, whether through death or divorce, our brains, it's like they take a while to catch up to the new reality.

Not only are we looking for them in places they used to be, whether through happy nostalgia or through terror, looking over your shoulder, are they still coming after you? Are they still telling bad stories? Has their family still got their sticky fingers in your life? Are you missing how it used to be in aching for how the future was supposed to go? Your brain takes a while to reboot itself or do the full software update, for lack of better phrasing, to the new reality because you're right, it wasn't supposed to be this way.

A grief event of any kind misaligns with your brain's expectation for how your life and your future and yourself were supposed to be. It's a lot of work. That's why I say that grief requires energy because it's like processing energy like CPU RAM, computer energy happening up here, but then also like physical energy and emotional energy. Sometimes, if you believe in this spiritual energy about what this all means or why you're here, what's your purpose in life or what is it all for, that's a type of spiritual energy that that gets processed when you're grieving too. I love that you brought that up.

I have one last question before we wrap up. I'm thinking I could talk to you for the next few hours.

 I always feel that way when we talk. I love it.

I want to talk about getting stuck in grief because we just talked about how give your loved one time and space. I think it's an interesting question. I know I had a friend many years ago, and it was a couple of years after my dad died. I talk about grief coming from the ocean that starts off as the tsunami and then it just becomes the tropical storm and then the waves are smaller and they're further apart. An event happens and it seems like you've slipped back.

The Long-Term Nature Of Grief And Its Intensities

This is what I was used to with my dad, but then a good friend of mine, her dad was like 10 or 15 years since he had passed and her grief was so much bigger than mine. I think back then I judged it and I was confused. I would love to end this with can people get stuck in grief and what does that look like and can deep grief last for years or decades?

I like this question. It's one that a lot of people have, and I’ll tell you my answer might be against the grain of what society or like a mental health or medical journal would tell you. That is for me and how I talk about it with my clients and students and the structure we create for ourselves is that a loss describes the event where something is lost, person, place, relationship, pet, dream, what have you. You can also grieve the death of a dream or the death of an ability or the death of your health. You can grieve a lot of things.

The loss is the thing that happens. Grief is everything that happens afterwards, including the sadness, the mourning, the bereavement, the anger, the nostalgia, but also the joy, the rebuilding, the connecting to community. When I say you wear your grief glasses, those are super glued to your face for the rest of your life.

The intensity of the grief and how often you're thinking of your person or how often you're actively mourning your relationship, that changes like the waves like you talk about. It can come with different seasons of the year. It can come with different milestones. A lot of people I work with say like their kids' graduation is a big activator for them or weddings or other big life events that we're supposed to look different, the expectations in our brains.

However, I firmly sit in this belief that once your life opens to grief or once grief befalls you, for lack of better phrasing, you're grieving forever. The intent, it's not a death sentence, all puns intended. It doesn't mean your life is terrible forever. It doesn't mean pain and suffering forever. It means you are remembering the things that have happened to you and the losses that you've endured and you've had to make space and room for them for the rest of your life.

 

Once your life opens to grief or once grief befalls you, you're grieving forever.

 

This can include setting up an altar in your home for somebody who's died. That's like a small microwave grieving for the rest of your life. It can be taking yourself out for a dinner on your divorce anniversary every year. They are the rituals and the stuff that makes up how you remember and how you honor it. Even if you don't have anything to honor the fact that you're divorced, there are still moments in your life.

Maybe you do enter into a future relationship and you see old patterns or old toxicities pop up and you're like, “I didn't realize that was still hanging on there. I’ve got to grieve that. I’ve got to process that.” It's just another word for you are carrying this this thing with you for the rest of your life. To your point of being stuck in grief because I think this is something a lot of people are curious about, it’s said in other ways.

When does grief become a bad thing or turn toxic or start to negatively impact our lives? I think that's really defined on a per person basis, which is not always a helpful answer. For me, being stuck in grief was the first two years after my mom died. I would not have called myself a grieving person at the time, but looking back I'm like, “Your mom died and then you started grieving. You just didn't have a way to express what you were grieving. You were mourning her, you were missing her, you were trying to find out how she fit into your life,” and that's grief, but you didn't have a way to express it.

For me, being stuck in grief is having no outlet of expression whatsoever. No screaming, no dancing, no yelling, no singing, no nothing. Those are the tools that work for me. For a lot of people, being stuck in grief is not having a place for grief to go or a way to get it up and out of their bodies. That's being stuck in grief. For a lot of people, being stuck in grief looks like or sounds like having no community to process with. Being stuck feels a lot more like isolation or aloneness and grief.

For other people, feeling stuck in grief feels like an inability to like get their brain back for lack of better phrasing or it has to do a lot with focus and motivation and productivity, especially as it pertains to work. For a lot of people, being stuck in grief feels like not having or seeing purpose in the world or not knowing where they belong or again, these spiritual questions of what does it all mean? What's it all for? What's the freaking point?

That can manifest as a type of stuckness and grief. I think it's a little bit different for everyone. Something that I'm learning from the teacher, Megan Devine. I'm in process of being certified as a grief professional through PESI right now. Megan Divine teaches when someone says they feel stuck in grief, ask them what that means to them because your definition of stuck in grief might look different than theirs.

Even in you telling your story, you were talking about your friend's expression of grief looking or presenting so much bigger than yours, but maybe to her, that is what her grief looks like months and years and decades down the road. That is her continuing to grieve and remember and mourn and miss, but also feel joy and gratitude for the person her father was in her life.

Maybe her expression is just more facially, visually, emotionally obvious. Something I love that I learned really early on as a grief coach is that griefs can't be compared, the intensity of our griefs. Even if we lost the same type of person, even if we both lost a father for instance, there is no way to put those things side by side and say what's better or worse or how are we doing? It's crappy because that's what society teaches us to do, to look on people on social media and movies and music and the news and our neighbors and our family and our coworkers and be like, well, they're coping like that. I must be doing something wrong.

I did a heck of a lot of that after my mom died. I was like, “Why is everyone so calm?” I could not figure out why no one was yelling. I realized people have such different ways of mourning. My father was very much a person of task oriented. We're getting all the medical bills taken care of and we're cleaning out the house and then we're getting remarried was like my father's plan of action. My sisters was to lean into God.

My mom was a pretty religious person and she and my sister really have that in common. Her spiritual journey and growth after my mom's death was enormous. Whereas mine was volume on that was way down. I was like, “I’ve got to yell.” No one else in my family was a yeller. I think if you asked any of us what being stuck felt like, you would get a different response each time, but only you can rank your losses.

For me, I call my mom's death the first and the worst. When you talk about losing a soulmate, my best friend tops that list because she was my best friend of more than a decade and just neighbor two blocks away, we did almost everything together. I loved her like I’ve never loved anybody else in my entire life. You talk about like pets and other non-human creatures.

Losing my cat, he tops another list. My soul cat. He's the very first cat I got as an adult and was with me when I got the news that my mom was dying and was with me again when I got the news that my best friend was dying, but also met everyone I ever dated in high school, college and beyond. He also was with me the day my wife and I got engaged and were married.

He's just with us through so many milestones. I think if you ask somebody what's the worst loss that's happened to you, even if you know some of their grief story, they might surprise you with what they say. They may say it was being traumatized in childhood. They may say this death of a dream job that I wanted so much because, and for instance, I couldn't join the Air Force because of my eyesight, or I couldn't become a Rockette because I was too tall.

You may know that their grandparent died and they were their closest person in life, but the thing they may be grieving most is the death of a dream. You really have to let people have their own individual experiences of what that means. I sense that for people that you're working with who are going through a divorce, the divorce feels like the loudest and the worst thing right now. I’ll say this too, that I see griefs and losses in their intensities as like big volume knobs over the course of our life.

In this season, divorce is the loudest loss. For people who have other losses like the death of a father, maybe we're cranking up the volume of dad dying too because they're both getting loud at the same time. In other seasons, it's the volume knobs of grief can all equalize or come down a little bit and they change day by day, sometimes hour by hour. New events in the world, things we can't control will spark our grief as well and have us either feeling stuck or feeling activated depending what's going on.

I know the election, the war in Gaza, every news headline that comes across my feed, I'm like, “This is another activator for someone else's grief for wildly different reasons.” Just honoring that's true for all of us and doing the best we can to take a deep breath and not compare as a first instinct, but to recognize or validate or empathize or give them that permission and space for grief to go on. When we let other people's grief continue and go on, we let our own grief continue to go on too. We continue to make space for it just in our lives and communities and in the world in general.

I love talking to you about this topic.

Thank you. I really do too. I’ve got to tell you, there is not enough in the world about grief and divorce together as a theme and as a topic. It is one of the most searched topics on Google regarding grief and no one is talking about it, no one is writing about it. I'm sure there are people, so I guess that's an exaggeration. People will search things like the five stages of grief for divorce or they'll search grief counselor for divorce. There's such a gap here for recognizing divorce as a grief event.

I feel we're reaching this tipping point. We're going to start recognizing this soon. One of my favorite things for this, I’ll give you one tiny fun thing before we go. One of my favorite things to do is look for grief themes in television and in the movies. My all-time favorite show is The Golden Girls. If you know the Golden Girls, you can follow me with this, but when you look at the relationship between Bea Arthur's character, Dorothy's Zbornak and her divorced husband, Stanley, and how he visits her life over and over again.

Sometimes they're talking about the conflict and how hard the falling out was, and sometimes they're trying to get back together and make it work again. Sometimes they're talking about grieving dreams, sometimes they're talking about how the lean years were awful and the great years were good and the weird relationships they each had with their in-laws. Over seven seasons, his relationship to her grew and evolved and changed and there was grief as a component in all of it.

Media Representations Of Grief And Divorce

My wife and I are watching Marvelous Mrs. Maisel where her husband cheats on her and then they break up, but then sometimes they're negotiating the relationship and what happens with our kids and what happens when I go overseas. This is set in the 1960s, so I know things were totally different back then in terms of laws and how things worked, but it's a really remarkable thing to look closely at the things we're already watching that have divorce as a theme in them.

Notice not just how long it goes on, although that can be validating. It's like, “This been going on for eight seasons.” It can be really validating. I'm allowed to go on for eight seasons, continuing to have these issues and these problems. It's not just to further the plot. This is based in somebody's real life somewhere because somebody decided to write it down.

Also recognizing all the different themes and all the different flavors, the freedom that can come from it, the stress, the lonely nights, the different relationships with your in-laws, the way your relationship with your kids and your pets and travel changes. If you're willing to treat the media that we create as a game of divorce, I spy or grief I spy, it's really neat to see how things come forward.

Of course, nobody gets it perfect all the time. I'm sick of people talking about in the five stages, and that's a whole other conversation. Five stages aren't real as a grief modality, but there are some really phenomenal pieces of art out there. Movies, music, television, all that jazz where you can see themes of divorce really presented in a healthy and a long-term way. I think that really matters when you're feeling alone in that grief.

Shelby, how can our readers find you?

I know grief is hard enough, so I’ll just give you one link and it's to my website and you can find literally everything else there. It's ShelbyForsythia.com and that's where all the social media lives. The thing I’ll give you is this. There's a button in the top right-hand corner that says Free Workshop, and it's literally an hour-long watch whenever you feel ready to watch it workshop that gives you three tools for getting unstuck in grief, whatever stuck means to you, and to start moving forward regardless of the type of loss that you faced.

Shelby, thank you for the work that you do in the world. Thank you for coming yet again to speak with me and my readers. Very much appreciated.

I'm so glad to. I’ve loved every single one of our conversations and if you tell me when you want to see me again, I’ll be here.

Absolutely. It's such an important topic and I know every one of you are experiencing some kind of grief and so check out Shelby, do the workshop when you're ready and it can only help. I hope that this conversation supported you, confirmed something comforted you in some way. We'll be back again real soon with another episode. Thanks, Shelby.

Thank you so much.

 

Important Links

• Shelby Forsythia
• Dear Grief Guide Podcast
• Set Boundaries, Find Peace
• Drama Free
• The Grieving Brain
• Free Workshop: Grow Through Grief: 3 Ways to Stop Feeling Stuck and Start Moving Forward
• Life After Loss Academy Online Grief Support Course + Community
• Shelby Forsythia on Facebook
• Shelby Forsythia on Instagram
• Shelby Forsythia on LinkedIn
• Shelby Forsythia on YouTube
• Journey Beyond Divorce on Instagram
• Book a Rapid Relief Call
• TalkingParents