Transforming Complex Grief into Authentic Power and Purpose
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- How unhealed childhood pain fuels patterns of abandonment and people-pleasing.
- The difference between normal grief and complex grief — and why so many get stuck.
- Why engaging with others is essential for healing after loss.
How to reframe your story and turn grief into a gateway for authentic living. - The SERVE healing framework and what each letter stands for.
- The four keys to living and dying without regret: Brilliance, Body, Brain, and Community.
- The pivotal lesson from Dr. Michelle’s mother that reshaped her life.
- How spiritual practice and movement unlocked her authentic self.
- Practical tools for recognizing and shifting patterns that keep you stuck in grief.
- How did the heartbreak of abandonment and betrayal in your early years shape your experience—and how did that pain lead you to become a “people pleaser”?
- What did your mother say to you while she was dying that inspired you to live your life more purposefully?
- How did the death of your parents catalyze a deeper inquiry into mortality, meaning, and healing for you, opening your eyes to see death not as an end but as a transition?
- What is complex grief, what causes it, and how can we recognize the signs of it?
- How does your groundbreaking SERVE framework help women heal and transform their lives?
- What tools did you gain on your spiritual pilgrimage that helped you to rebuild your life with deeper wisdom?
Grab Step into Your Brilliance, compiled by Rebecca Hall Gruyter: https://amzn.to/4mf8rEW
🎁 Special Gift for Grief and Rebirth Podcast Listeners
As a thank-you for tuning in, Michelle is offering the Complex Grief Checklist & Assessment—a powerful tool to help you understand where you are in your grief journey and what support could help you move forward.
👉 Get your free gift here: complexgriefchecklist.com/l/complex-grief-checklist
💫 Release Your Grief and Thrive
If you’re ready to release the weight of grief and reclaim your joy, Michelle is offering 10% off any of her Release Your Grief and Thrive programs—self-study, group mastermind, or private VIP—for listeners who book a discovery call through the G & R audience.
👉 Book your discovery call here: https://tally.so/r/nr2GgM
About the Program:
Release Your Grief and Thrive is an 8-session, 4-month private program designed to help you heal complex grief—especially when current loss is intertwined with past wounds like abandonment or unresolved trauma.
Through Michelle’s proven SERVE System of Transformation—Surrender, Engage, Reframe, Vision, and Express—you’ll receive:
- 24 training videos with workbooks
- 6 private coaching sessions
- 2 powerful VIP deep-dives
This isn’t just about recovery—it’s about creating a life of meaning, connection, and joy after loss.
GRIEF AND REBIRTH LINKS
✨ Irene’s new anthology book, Good to the Last Drop! Embracing Your Life’s Third Chapter is now available on Amazon.
✨ Get the audiobook version of Irene’s book, They Serve Bagels in Heaven, for FREE when you sign up for Audible’s FREE 30-day trial using her link: https://amzn.to/4dG4l4w
✨ For a curated collection of Irene’s favorite books, music, healing events, and self-care essentials, head over to kit.co/GriefandRebirth.
✨ Find your next source of healing and inspiration at the Grief and Rebirth Bookshop.
Listen to all episodes of the Grief and Rebirth Podcast HERE:
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✨ Get your copy of Irene’s book: They Serve Bagels in Heaven: One Couple’s Story of Love, Eternity, and the Cosmic Importance of Everyday Life
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Transforming Complex Grief into Authentic Power and Purpose
Unveiling Dr. Michelle Peticolas: A Journey of Healing and Transformation
I hope this finds each of you very well. I’m speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I could not be more delighted to have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Michelle Peticolas. In addition to earning her PhD in Sociology from Indiana University, she is the author of several books, including her international bestselling book titled Step Into Your Brilliance, the visionary force behind the award-winning documentary trilogy Secrets of Life and Death. She is a captivating speaker and a life coach whose work inspires deep healing and personal transformation.
Dr. Michelle helps high-achieving midlife women who have been thrown off track by a major loss to release their complex grief and transmute it into fuel for achieving their soul’s purpose. Using her unique framework SERVE, she guides her clients through their grief healing, mind reset, and reconnection to their authentic brilliance. What gives Michelle’s work its true authenticity is her profound passage through grief from navigating the heartbreak of abandonment and betrayal to watching her mother’s final moments in a cluttered toy studio filled with unfulfilled dreams.
Michelle’s profound journey through grief became the catalyst for her personal transformation. This path led her on a spiritual pilgrimage that redefined her understanding of death and ignited a rebirth that continues to infuse her work with depth, clarity, and transcendent purpose. With over eighteen years of experience spanning coaching, hospice care, and the unique lens of a sociologist and filmmaker, Michelle has inspired countless women to transform their complex grief into a pathway for healing, empowerment, and spiritual growth.
I’m looking forward to talking with Michelle, finding us from El Cerrito, California, about the heartbreak of abandonment and betrayal in her early years, her courageous passage through grief after her mother’s transition, the spiritual pilgrimage that reshaped her understanding of death and led to a spiritual rebirth, the causes of complex grief, her groundbreaking SERVE framework that has helped countless women heal and transform their lives, and more for what promises to be a soulful, healing, and transformational conversation.
Welcome, Michelle.
Thank you so much. What an introduction.
Thank you. I can PDF it and send it to you.
I’m going to put that on my website.
You know where to go and ask. You got it. Not a problem. My pleasure. I really do this because you are special. You have achieved all these things. You’re going to be speaking from a lot of expertise and a lot of heart. I want our audience to know about your credits. What makes you worth their taking the time out of their day with whatever they’re doing to listen to the wisdom you have to teach them, to listen to the heart you have to share with them, to grow, and to evolve. This is my pleasure.
You speak to my heart. Thank you so much.
Early Years: The Heartbreak of Abandonment and Betrayal
Thank you, and vice versa. Let’s get them to know about you, your early years, and what started to form you into this marvelous person that we are talking to here. Let’s share because, as a kid, you had the heartbreak of abandonment and betrayal, which you experienced in your early years. It forced you to become a people pleaser. Even when you earned your PhD, instead of love and respect, you experienced pain and disappointment. Do you want to tell us about that?
I would be happy to. First, I want to tell everybody out there that my childhood, on the surface, didn’t look all that traumatic. I’ve heard some of the other stories on the show, and it seems tame. Here’s the thing. There was a study done by the London Journal of Pediatric Care about the need that children have for nurturance, touch, and love. It’s not enough to give them a safe home, food, and clothing. They need to feel seen and loved. I was born into a family of six children. I was the third. I actually had seven years of being the baby, but my mother was a young woman and was overwhelmed. I didn’t bond with her.
It's not enough for children to have a safe home, food, and clothing. They need to feel seen and loved. Share on X
That was back in the days when they told moms not to nurse their children. I bonded with my dad. When I was two years old, he was in the military. He was transferred to Japan. He did not die. He did not disappear from my life, but it was long enough for me to be traumatized. By the time I got to see him again, I’d lost trust in him. I’d lost trust in myself. I had lost trust in life. I decided I was going to take it upon myself to figure out how to survive, which, by the way, is what the psychologists say. Children need to survive. They will find something that works.
How old were you when all this was happening?
I was two years old.
Two years old when he left until he reconnected with the family?
It was probably a few months later. It was nothing. It wasn’t like he had disappeared from my life, but already, my relationship with him had changed. That two-year-old time is very critical because we’re starting to develop our sense of self at that point. I believed that it was my fault that he left, that somehow I was not worthy, and that there was something wrong. I set out to try to prove my worth. The way in which I did it was to please people, to give them what they wanted, so they could see that I was worthy. There’s another side to this story, which is my parents, because this stuff is generational. My mother was an only child. Both her parents worked. She was what they call a latchkey child.
She didn’t get the emotional nurturance when she was growing up, either. How could she know what to do for you?
Yes, how did she? She was desperate for attention. She was brilliant at attracting attention, but she didn’t know how to give it. At the age of ten, my father’s mother drove away with his oldest brother to visit family and never returned. She died on the way. His brother took off and never returned. This was his effect. This was his impact. Neither of them knew how to handle their grief, that early childhood grief. Not only did I have my own experience, but all the role modeling that they gave me about how they handled their grief. I didn’t know. I totally shut down my feelings. What I learned was to be strong and hang out in my brain, which, by the way, I fell in love with.
You’re brilliant, but I want to comment that you’re defining intergenerational pain that when people don’t heal it, and they’re not conscious of it, they transfer it on and on until someone says the legacy has to stop.
Yes, absolutely.
You went on as a people pleaser, and then it didn’t even work for you when you were in your PhD.
That’s true, but it worked for a hell of a long time. All through high school, all through college, I got accolades. I felt, “It wasn’t love, but it was the next best thing.” I got my first teaching job at a small college in Winona, Minnesota. I did everything I could as a people pleaser to please everyone. I had this big awakening. You can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.
You can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time. Share on X
I didn’t. I got let go from that job after my second year. I was devastated. What happens with people pleasers who are worried about their self-worth is that they don’t see it as the other person’s issue. They see it as their own issue. What I did was make myself smaller and smaller. I took jobs that I knew I was overqualified for so that that wouldn’t happen. I got to the point where I was finally only taking temp jobs because I knew that it was going to be temporary, and I would never have to feel that rejection.
I believe that the universe is always trying to wake us up to who we really are. That first effort didn’t quite work. I hunkered down. The next one was when my first husband left me. The thing is that when you hold down your emotions, which is what I did, you aren’t able to feel any of the good emotions. I was never able to love my first husband in a real, true way. That was his issue.
I look at that, and you were transferring on, once again, the behavior that you learned then.
That’s right. There was abandonment again. He left me for another woman, and I was devastated. This is the whole story about the PhD. I thought that the PhD was going to be my ticket to worthiness, that I had finally found the solution. I got the PhD. First, my husband leaves me for another woman. Before that, I had my father visit me, who is the sun and moon to me. I asked him, “Dad, what do you think of my PhD?” You know what he said to me? He said, “I’m so ashamed. I never finished my BA, my college degree.” Did I hear he’s feeling ashamed of himself? The third thing was that my boss at the time, I said to him, “Dave, will you introduce me to social services as Dr. Peticolas?” He said to me, “Why don’t you tattoo it on your forehead?” I did not speak the word doctor for thirteen years. It even disappeared from my resume. I was so ashamed.
The Spiritual Awakening: Reclaiming Personal Power
There’s something else that happened to you. Your mother said something to you when she was dying.
Before we go there, I joined a spiritual community because I was trying to escape relationships and worthiness in the business world. I would work part-time. I would go off to the spiritual community. What did I do? I actually replaced my father, my husband, and my boss with my spiritual teacher. I did everything I could to earn his approval. He was a real spiritual teacher. He made me go through one of the most excruciating experiences I’ve ever had to wake me up to the way in which I had been giving all my power away to other people by letting them judge me. You can hear about that story sometime. I don’t know if you want me to tell that story right now.
Quickly, because why not? We’re going to talk about how that spiritual pilgrimage gave you tools to build your life. What he was doing for you was one of the tools that he gave you. He woke you up. When we have a spiritual awakening, there are different ways it happens. This is the way it happened for you.
One of the ways in which people earned my spiritual teacher’s regard was by being Middle Eastern dancers. I had been working very hard to learn how to dance. I was basically stiff as a board because I was so shut down. I worked and worked. Finally, in a workshop in New York, I got my first real solo, which was for all of three minutes. He invites me to a presentation in the Bronx. I’m like, “Great.” I said, “Does he want me to videotape, or does he want me to dance?” I get up there. I look around, and all the other women are his prime best dancers.
I ask him, “Adnan, do you want me to dance? I was okay not to dance.” He said, “You could dance.” I go out into this cold, frigid auditorium in the middle of January with a belly dance costume on, videotaping for almost two hours. I finally realized when I saw the same dancers getting up for the second time. He has forgotten about me. I’m telling you, tears running down my cheeks onto the camera. He must have recognized I was upset because he sent a replacement out. When I get on that stage, I cannot dance.
I am so mortified. I’m so upset that I couldn’t dance. I leave the stage. He comes to me and says, “You really are a good dancer.” I burst into tears. He says, “Why don’t you come to my class and dance for yourself?” I was like, “For myself?” I did. It broke me wide open. I made up my mind at that point. I would never let anybody judge my dance. That’s the lesson of the people pleaser. Don’t let other people judge who or what you are.
That’s a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing that, Michelle. In a way, he freed you for the first time to get in touch with yourself. This was part of who you are, but you could never get in touch with that.
Here’s how I knew that I had it right. Once I made that decision, I started dancing because it made me feel free. It made me feel exalted. It filled me with joy. Next time, I went to his workshop. He asked me to dance. He gave me a real solo. I was out there for a while. It was like, “Finally, you got it.”
It’s beautiful. Here, what a healing that was because in a way, your father couldn’t laud you and give you credit for the PhD and the work that you did. Here, you’re getting lauded for dancing, doing belly dancing, doing that right, and opening up. He helped you to release that part of yourself, right?
That part of myself that thought I had to do everything for other people and not for me. That was the key.
Mother’s Wisdom: Living a Life Without Regret
There’s another key that came when your mother was dying. We’re going to the next step in your evolution.
This was the next step because I hadn’t quite generalized this lesson. I’m sitting in my mother’s studio, going through her papers, designs that she had of various toys. I had one, the Xerox copy. She looks at it and says, “I guess I’ll never get to that project.” Her words pierced my heart. I was so speechless, but I was also afraid of the emotions because I hadn’t quite gotten them online. I pulled that paper back, and I said, “We don’t need to talk about this right now.”
You shut her down.
I shut her down. I did. First of all, I decided I was not going to live my life with regret. If my mother, who was, for me, the poster child of living your passion, could have regrets, where did that leave me, the people pleaser? I was like, “That’s it. I am not living my life with regret.” That’s when I decided to make my documentary film series. In the process of that, I had so many realizations about death, about life, about being true to my calling, and about believing in myself. It was quite a journey.
You know what I’m amazed at with this little part of a journey? All of a sudden, you become empowered enough to do a documentary series. Who would think that and go there? That took a lot of burgeoning self-esteem.
Or fear of death, fear of regret. Self-esteem has come in the process, but it’s a journey to change the programming that we get so early in life.
Death as Transition: A New Understanding of Life’s Purpose
The other thing I want to ask you is, when your parents both died, how many years was the space in between when they both died?
Six months.
They opened your eyes to see death not as an end but as a transition. That was another big healing step for you. What was that about?
Some of that was in my spiritual training with my teacher, but in that experience of their dying, particularly my mother, it was such a special time. Suddenly, I realized, “This is what life is about.” I’d never thought about death before. Suddenly, it’s like, “This is it.” I had so many downloads at that time about living with awareness, living with your purpose, and living a life that was true to myself. That was the big opening for me. That gave me the courage to do something as ridiculous as doing a documentary film series.
That’s amazing. I so admire that. That’s absolutely wonderful. Were there any other tools from your spiritual pilgrimage that helped you rebuild your life after that? Should we go right into when, after you transitioned from it, you started a therapeutic program in California?
How did that happen?
Here you are, step by step. This is amazing as you’re opening up.
After I made the documentary series, I somehow thought that the universe was going to open to me, but it didn’t. I actually had to do a lot of work to launch my film series and get it out there into the universities. I did a lot of presentations because I wanted to make it true. I started working as a hospice support facilitator for people who had experienced partner loss. I felt so connected to this. The interesting thing was that I must have been receiving downloads from the universe because I knew intuitively that this was a doorway. It had been a doorway for me, a gateway into a new way of living.
I filled these people who were in my group with this hope and this understanding. I was constantly aware that these messages would come to me when I was working with these people to help them transcend, to shift. There was this one man who believed that his wife was his wife for life, and he would never be married again. He lost his wife to cancer. Every time he heard a radio show or read an article about her cancer, he would feel grief.
I said to him, “What if you saw this grief, not as something bad, but actually as a measure of your love for your wife? Instead of beating yourself up, celebrate.” He started doing it. He was out of that grief group within a month. That one little thing totally changed his perspective. That’s when I started to realize I had something. I was getting something. By the way, when I work with my clients, I get downloads all the time about what to do.
It’s marvelous. You went into this therapeutic program. How did you choose that therapeutic program? Did you attend a therapeutic program in California?
That was before my parents died. I went into a therapeutic program because I had met my second husband, but we weren’t there yet. I realized that he was still hurting from the loss of another relationship. He kept on pulling back. As he pulled back, I pulled back. If you keep on pulling back, pretty soon, that relationship is going to be gone. I decided I needed help. He had gone to this therapeutic program in California, which was called the Quadrinity Process. Finally, I decided, “That’s what I’m going to do.” I went out there. It was a thirteen-week-long program. It was amazing. It was the first coaching program I had ever experienced.
I want to say something. Hold your thought. I want everybody to know how open Michelle was to trying these different things. You could have walked out the door to any of them that didn’t work, but you were open to learning, trying, and dealing. That’s why you kept growing.
Here I was with a guy that I wanted a relationship with. I saw that if I didn’t heal this, this relationship was not going to survive. I saw it. I said, “I want this relationship. I want this guy. I’m going to do the work.” I’m happy to report we’re close to 30 years.
Decoding Complex Grief: Causes, Signs, and Healing
Fantastic. Congratulations. That’s marvelous. I want you to please explain to everyone because this is such a big part of what you do to help people. What is complex grief? What causes it? How do we recognize the signs of it?
Complex grief is grief that’s amplified by earlier losses that have never been completely healed. When you have a current loss, all the other stuff pops to the surface. It has never been resolved. You’re not only dealing with the current loss, which is probably plenty, but all this other stuff. Oftentimes, people get stuck because they don’t have the tools to navigate that much loss simultaneously.
You have this SERVE framework that you created that helps people deal with all of that.
By the way, I’m convinced this was also downloaded.
I’ll bet. Explain that each letter of SERVE means something. You want to tell us about it and how it transmutes complex grief?
S is surrendering to the experience. Allow the emotions. By the way, this is the number one problem that all the clients who come to me have. They may allow themselves to cry, but then they don’t know how to stop the crying, or they don’t allow it at all. Either way, the emotions that are in our bodies are not able to be released. Not only do you not ever heal the loss, but you actually can set yourself up for health issues because, in holding those emotions down, you are tensing your body in certain areas. I work with people around their bodies. I help their body to speak to them and tell them what the body needs. It’s a magical process.
That must be amazing because many people are so numbed out. They’re not aware of what’s going on with them. Your next letter is E for engage. What is that about?
Engage is to engage with other people. When you lose somebody, whether through divorce, we experience a major breaking of a bond. We are social creatures. We are wired to bond with each other. When you break a bond like that, you are triggering a survival response in this human body. You can see all the time these fight, flee, freeze, and fawn responses. The fight, when there are all these arguments with the doctor or with the family members. This is trying to release that energy through anger.
We are social creatures, wired to bond. When that bond breaks, it triggers a survival response in the human body. Share on X
The flee is where you see a lot of people doing all this traveling, because they don’t want to face their grief. They renovate their house, or they move to another state. It’s all trying to flee. The freeze is when people go into that place of depression, want to stay in bed, and not do anything because they are not able to deal with it. That is the fight, flee, freeze. You need to engage, first of all, to reassure the body that you’re still loved, that people still care about you, and that people are still there for you.
That’s the R. You’re reframing your relationship to that. Now, you’re shifting your perspective. Tell us about that.
You’re shifting your perspective on grieving. You’re shifting your perspective on the fact that you need hugs from people, even if that isn’t your spouse or your child. You’re shifting your whole sense of your story. You reinvent your life story in a place where it doesn’t end up being devastated and disempowered, but it actually is the gateway to a life that’s more true to yourself. I take people on that journey. They take themselves on that journey. They reinvent their lives.
I’ve been there. It is so freeing. The V and the E in SERVE stand for?
I don’t let go once you’ve gotten over that grief part. Vision is the V. You want to have a vision as the next step after grief. I don’t leave you just, “Now, you don’t feel the grief anymore.” You want to use this experience to guide you to what your next chapter is. I help people identify what their next vision is. By the way, you might not get it right away. It may take some experimentation. It may take some self-exploration.
I usually start with, “How can you celebrate your loved one? What big, bold thing can you do that celebrates them?” For me, it was making a documentary film series. This action, this step, will actually help you to go to the next step. The last one is E for express. You’ve gone through this journey. You need to share it with other people. What have you learned? What is your realization? Share that with other people so that they, too, can start to heal.
Step into Your Brilliance
Pass it forward, as they say. It sounds to me like what you do with the SERVE network helps people become more authentic and more in touch with themselves. In a way, you’re giving and spiritually aligned because they’re now getting in touch with a new purpose in their lives, which is to heal and pass it forward. Michelle, what are these four keys to living and dying without regret that you talk about?
Four Keys to a Regret-Free Life: Brilliance, Body, Brain, and Community
Number one is what I call brilliance. Brilliance is connecting and tapping into who you really are. It’s that higher self. It’s that connection to divine wisdom that we all have. That’s the number one. In fact, that should be the leader of the pack. That is where we want our guidance to come from. This is the real guidance, not the left brain. It’s the right brain and spirit. Number two, the body. The body has so much wisdom inside of it. It tells the truth. Watch out for the brain, but listen to the body. When the body has aches and pains, if you go to that place, it actually has wisdom to share with you. You want to embrace and love your body. Take care of it. Make it feel safe. That will be part of your joy. Give it what it needs.
Number three is the brain. The brain is powerful. It often is our major guide in life, but you want to temper that brain and not let it take over. You want to be aware of how your brain is guiding you. Let your spirit help to educate your brain in a different way, just like when I told that man that he didn’t need to feel bad about his grief. The final one is the others. We need to connect with others. It’s like engage. We need to engage with other people. We’re humans. We need other people to survive. We need to recognize that and celebrate that, but you have to be careful about who you reach out to and who you connect with. You need to pull in people who uplift you and celebrate you, not people who judge you and push you down.
I would imagine if you combine brilliance, body, brain, and community, and you live with those principles, you’re not going to be one of these people who, when they’re dying, say, “I have so many regrets in my life. I should have done this. I should have talked to that one.” Speaking of that, you have an amazing, inspiring story about a woman who came to your free grief presentation, still mourning the loss of her husband after twenty years. With these principles and all, what happened? What was that story all about?
Her story was a story of multiple abandonment. Here’s the thing. If you don’t deal with the initial issue, it will repeat itself over and over again until you finally get the lesson. For her, it was abandonment. It went all the way back to her childhood. Her mother was not a very responsible mother. Her father left her. Her grandmother, who took care of her for a while, died. That’s three. Her husband, finally, she’s found the solution to her life, the guy who will really take care of her, but then he dies.
You need to pull in people that uplift and celebrate you, not people that judge and push you down. Share on X
She’s devastated because she’s never had any of those earlier losses. She is now in the process of heading towards her fifth abandonment, because every time she sees her adult son, who looks like her husband, tears are pouring down her face. We worked together. I helped her go through the SERVE system. Even though she was crying, she was not really releasing her emotions. She was recycling it with her brain.
Every time she would cry, she would tell herself all these terrible stories. It would make her cry and cry, but it was never finally cathartic. I taught her how to release her emotions without engaging the brain so that she could finally completely allow the emotions to release. Within less than a month, she stopped crying. It was the biggest boon to her relationship with her adult son.
What a role model and what a gift to pass to him. You finally did so that he wouldn’t be abandoned by his mother, which would pass on the pain.
In that process, because she finally created that space for herself, she went back to school. She found an interest in gardening and photography. She developed a whole new life purpose.
You helped her to find herself. It’s marvelous. Speaking of finding yourself, tell us about the special gift that you’ve got for our Grief and Rebirth audience called the Complex Grief Checklist. Be sure to check it out. Tell us about that, Michelle.
The Complex Grief Checklist helps you to understand how complex grief might be operating in your life and how it’s showing up. It’s not things that you necessarily understand or even realize. They’re subterranean behaviors. This will help you to identify them. Also, I provide an assessment afterward that helps you understand why and how this is operating in your life. This is actually a transformational tool that you want to take because you’re going to start to see, “Maybe I do have complex grief. Maybe this is holding me back from living my life purpose. Maybe this is holding me back from being bigger. Maybe this is the reason why I’ve been holding myself down.”
With that in mind, I want to ask you to describe to everybody all the ways that they can access your brilliance and what you can do to help them. I know that you have individual grief transformation coaching. It’s called Release Your Grief and Thrive. You’re making discovery calls possible with you, which is fabulous. Can you tell us all about that?
Set up an appointment with me to have a discovery session. This is totally free. It would be helpful if you did the Complex Grief Checklist first, because then, you will be more aware of what’s going on and what in your past has been holding you back. In that discovery session, we will start to unpack what your situation is and what you can do to heal. If you end up wanting to work with me, which you might want to, if there is a connection and a resonance, then for those of you who have come to this show, I’m giving you a 10% discount on my regular pricing.
That’s so lovely. Once they talk with you and they set something up, then you’ll arrange it with them. That’s marvelous.
I have three different ways in which you can engage. If you’re a self-starter, you can have my Release Your Grief and Thrive program all by yourself, self-study, or have a grief group, which is for people who are against self-starters and don’t need to have their hands held. The private session is for those of you who need privacy, who need to have that container and feel the safety of speaking with me, and having me witness, help, and guide you forward.
The Michelle Message: Embracing Joy Through Healing
It is completely without judgment, which is so beautiful. On that note, what is the Michelle message about the importance of healing to share with our audience?
Joy. If you don’t heal yourself, you’re going to have this brain beating you up all the time. Whatever that early childhood stuff is and whatever trauma you went through, it’s going to be beating you up because the body is wired to try to make you survive. It thinks that if it tells you all these terrible things, you will stay safe. The reality is you may stay safe, but you won’t experience joy. You want to pay attention to yourself and be in the present. All the misery is in the future and in the past. In the moment, you can find out who you really are and tap into your greater wisdom.
That’s beautiful. If we drop our backpack full of stuff and we heal, then the rest of us can be open to experiencing joy. When a lot of us have all these issues, like you did in your early days, you shut down.
I did. I know the shutdown process, and I also know how to get yourself back online.
That’s marvelous. Michelle, I want to thank you for sharing your personal healing journey, your spiritual rebirth, and your healing and transformative SERVE framework with us. I admire its unique power to guide women through grief, shift their inner narratives, and awaken the brilliance already within them, inspiring them to step boldly into lives lit with purpose. This has been an enlightening and transformative interview. From my heart, I wish you abundant blessings.
Guest’s Links:
- Connect with Dr. Michelle Peticolas on LinkedIn
- Check out Step Into Your Brilliance, compiled by Rebecca Hall Gruyter
- Secrets of Life and Death
- Get your free Complex Grief Checklist
- Book your discovery call for Release Your Grief and Thrive
- Connect with Dr. Michelle Peticolas on Instagram
- Check out Secrets of Life and Death on Facebook
About Dr. Michelle Peticolas
Dr. Michelle Peticolas is an international best-selling author of Step Into Your Brilliance, as well as several other books
She is the award-winning filmmaker of Secrets of Life and Death, a professional speaker, and a life transformation coach.
Dr. Michelle helps high-achieving, mid-life women who have been thrown off track by a major loss to release their complex grief and transmute it into fuel for their achieving their soul’s purpose. Using her unique framework SERVE, she guides her clients through their grief healing, mind reset, and reconnection to their authentic brilliance.
