MidLife Dating

What happens when you combine profound grief experiences with deep expertise in human relationships? Jonathan, a dating and relationship coach specializing in midlife relationships, shares how developing what he calls "emotional scaffolding" through self-love became his lifeline through multiple devastating losses.

Seven years ago, Jonathan lost his 19-year-old son in an accident. But that wasn't his first encounter with grief. Years earlier, he experienced the triple blow of divorce, job loss, and financial collapse during the 2008 market crash. More recently, he weathered the end of a treasured relationship with someone he had hoped to marry. Through these experiences, he discovered a powerful approach to healing: "We can grieve with suffering or we can grieve with love."

This conversation takes us deep into what self-love truly means. Jonathan explains that we all have an "emotional six-year-old" within us that needs nurturing, especially during times of loss. Rather than bypassing difficult emotions like anger or sadness, he encourages listeners to experience their feelings fully—just as children naturally do. This emotional honesty builds the foundation for moving forward after loss without denying our past.

For those considering dating after loss, Jonathan offers invaluable guidance. Drawing from his professional experience coaching midlife women, he describes today's dating landscape as "The Hunger Games" and shares what to look for in potential partners. Most importantly, he suggests seeking someone capable of genuine empathy—not just sympathy—for your past losses. Can they hold space for the reality that previous relationships remain part of your emotional landscape?

Whether you're navigating grief, considering new relationships, or simply seeking to build emotional resilience, this conversation offers compassionate wisdom about honoring our feelings while nurturing ourselves through life's inevitable losses. By extending the same care to ourselves that we would offer a hurting child, we create the emotional foundation needed to embrace new possibilities while honoring our past.

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Credits: 
Music by Kevin MacLeod 

Copyright 2020, by As I Live and Grieve

The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. 

Transcript

Welcome to 'As I Live and Grieve'

Speaker 1 0:01

Welcome to as I Live and Grieve, a podcast that tells the truth about how hard this is. We're glad you joined us today. We know how hard it is to lose someone you love and how well-intentioned friends and family try so hard to comfort us. We created this podcast to provide you with comfort, knowledge and support. We are grief advocates, not professionals, not licensed therapists. We are you.

Speaker 2 0:27

Hi everyone, Welcome back again to another episode of as I Live in Grief. Another great guest. I know I say it every week, but it's true. Some now pay its cross and its destiny maybe karma Call it. What you will With me today is Jonathan. Hi, Jonathan, Thanks for joining me.

Speaker 3 0:44

Hey, kathy, I'm honored to be here.

Speaker 2 0:47

Oh, it's my honor truly To start us out. Would you just give a little bit of your background so our listeners can get to know who is Jonathan?

Speaker 3 0:57

You know that's an interesting question. Who is Jonathan? Just from a background perspective, I mean professionally, I'm a dating and relationship coach, primarily helping women in midlife, and I say midlife is after baby making years and before retirement. So most of the people that work with me or follow me are between the age of 42 and 69. And the reason why I target women is to help them understand men, because women, it seems to me they're always Google search why do men do this and why do men do that? So I thought, well, I'll start a business helping women understand why men do everything they do, particularly in the romantic realm.

Speaker 2 1:38

Yeah, yeah, Bingo for sure. Now, as I read your profile, your journey to where you are today actually started with a loss.

Speaker 3 1:47

Well, you know, it's interesting because to some degree well, and I know where you were going and I'll just let your audience know and I'm I'm totally OK with this. Seven years, almost seven years ago, I lost my 19 year old son to an accident and that grief did cause me to open up different portals in my life, emotionally speaking. The only reason why I had to pause for a second is I had another loss even before that, when I went through a divorce, and there was a gigantic emotional shift that happened in my life. That happened maybe 10 plus years prior to my son passing away. So I had that loss and during my divorce I also lost my job and I got wiped out in the market crash. So I had another series of losses.

Speaker 3 2:36

But bringing it back to my son passing away in my grief, let me share this with you, kathy, when I was giving his eulogy and you know I'd written a script to share with everyone, you know stories and that sort of thing I paused in the middle of it and I said to everyone his family, his friends I said, look, we can grieve with suffering or we can grieve with love, and what I meant by that is I knew that he would not want me to suffer one day. But at the same time, I'm in deep pain. We are all in deep, real pain, and so the idea is to look at it from the lens about love. I'd been journaling about self-love because I'm like what the heck is self-love anyway? Which is the actual title of a book I published nine months to the day after he passed.

Speaker 3 3:33

And while it's not a dating or relationship book and it's not a healing of grief book, it's just that I believe that self-love and the investment in the self builds emotional scaffolding so that when we do have a tragedy, a loss, that we have enough. I use the term emotional scaffolding to navigate the pain of a loss. And just to add to this equation, about two years ago I was in a treasured relationship, someone I deeply cared for, and she didn't want to continue in the relationship. And boy did I experience another level of loss because, while she's still alive, but it was the death of my dream because I wanted to marry this woman, and loss is part of our life on a regular basis.

Speaker 2 4:23

Well, it certainly is, and I so appreciate you being so candid as to mention the other losses, because numerous times on this podcast I have mentioned that we most frequently talk about loss by death. Yeah, you know, death of a spouse, death of a parent, death of a child. But grief is related to any loss and I even mentioned that a toddler who leaves their favorite stuffed animal behind in a restaurant or on an airplane they grieve as well.

Speaker 3 4:52

They really do.

Speaker 2 4:55

They have just suffered a loss. So, absolutely, the losses that you suffered and I usually will list them, I'll tick them off on my fingers. Yes, there's loss through death. There's also divorce, there's loss of a relationship, there's loss of a job, there's loss of your lifestyle, your finances and everything, and gosh, it sounds like I've ticked everyone off that you just listed oh gosh, yes, I mean that's. That's a lot of loss, john.

Speaker 3 5:21

I mean, I mean I'm like I'm not laughing, I mean it's more just that, hearing the totality of it, because I forgot that at one point, when I went through that financial loss, I used to live in a multimillion dollar home and I had to move in with my mother and father in a retirement, yeah, you know, and like there was a different emotional effect going on there. So, yeah, no, I've hit every bucket and I don't want to invite anymore.

Speaker 2 5:51

Yeah, well, no, I understand there. So it would be. To me it's a natural segue, if you will, from your losses to self-love. And I say that because I remember standing in my living room calling my daughter on the phone. This is probably, I don't know maybe six weeks or so after my husband died seven years ago, and I said to my daughter, stephanie, I feel like I have to redefine my life. I'm not me anymore, the me I was even before Tom died. I'm not me. I can't go back to that, because my entire world has slipped upside down and my path, my journey, started out by appreciating a lot of the little things in my life, and I actually spent an entire weekend in some self-introspection, thinking about how I felt about different things, and I did gradually rebuild my life. I redefined myself not the same person at all that I was before Tom died, but my qualifier on that is that I can honestly say I am happier now than I have ever been at any other point in my life.

Speaker 3 6:59

Yeah, I mean it's amazing how what to some degree is a tragedy is a portal to another evolution of our soul, our spirit, our identity, as you will. And you know it's interesting because I wrote a book about self-love, right, what the heck is self-love anyway? And you know a lot of people like like what is self-love? And I want to kind of spend a moment kind of unpacking that the way I view it. And that is, when I think of self-love, I think of self-worth, self-esteem, self-confidence, self-reliance, self-discipline, all these juicy words. And the only reason why it's encapsulated in love is the love of self, not from a selfish point of view, but from a heart-centered view. But some people take a little offense to that. Even so, the way I characterize self-love is we all have an emotional six-year-old inside of us, that little six-year-old that you know the stuffed animal was left at the park and it's since gone and we're grieving that. We all have an emotional six-year-old inside of us. And I don't care if you're 100 years old, you still got it, yeah, and self-love is nurturing that emotional six-year-old inside of us. And, by the way, the age is irrelevant for those listening, I'm just picking at six, right Is that? We all have an emotional child inside of us that needs nurturing. So the question becomes well, how do we nurture that little six-year-old inside of us?

Self-Love vs. Suffering in Grief

Speaker 3 8:32

When I look back at my trajectory and I shared 20 years ago, going through a divorce, losing my high-end corporate job and the market crash of 2008 and 9, well, not quite 20 years ago, close to 20 years ago and my identity was crushed. I'll be candid with you, I got addicted to something. Now I wasn't, and I'll be candid with you. I did drugs and alcohol, but that wasn't the addiction. The addiction was online dating and I was going out on date after date, after date, after date. I mean literally twice a week sometimes. That was my drug of choice. And after one year of doing this, I looked in the mirror and I would meet by the way, kathy, I'd meet a really nice woman, nice date. Something wasn't right. Meet another woman nice date, nice woman, something right. And then I realized after a year is like I'm the common denominator, you're the something. I was the common denominator.

Speaker 3 9:32

So that's when I began a journey of personal development, self-help, spiritual work and therapy to start addressing what was going on inside of me. So the beginning of my journey was just an exploration. Well, I'll encapsulate everything in personal development, self-help, and that included Tony Robbins and that included Wayne Dyer, and that I mean I could start going through the laundry list of people. But that was the beginning. Foray to self-love.

Speaker 3 10:02

If I said that, if I pronounced that properly, that was the beginning to it for me was just to start to nurture my soul through this kind of 40,000 foot realm. By the time my son passed away, I became much more granular in my work and I did things like the Hoffman Process and Insight Institute and I started to do more therapy to really start to really understand my emotions and my feelings and, more importantly, kathy, to actually articulate my emotions and feelings, to be able to express myself to another person. And I witnessed this metamorphosis of when I started to understand my emotions and feelings and when I could talk about it in a way that actually can be seen, heard and understood, instead of the way most people communicate their emotions and feelings, which sounds something like this Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah wah wah, maybe think of a peanut show, maybe think of a peanut show.

Speaker 3 11:04

Exactly, there's just a lot of vomit of information, but without any real substance to what's really going on inside. And you know it's interesting because, as I shared earlier, about a year and a half ago a little bit more than a year and a half ago I was in a significant relationship with someone I deeply cared for and, despite all this work, I want to own something for your audience. So I immediately went into that, grieving with love you know being radical acceptance and I was like, oh, you know I can handle this right. You know, in fact, I have a substantial YouTube channel and she was a regular on it and I had to share with my audience that she was no longer going to be here. And I'm like I'm going to get through this.

Speaker 3 11:53

And, sure enough, about eight months in, if the universe didn't smack me upside the head and said, you know, you thought radical acceptance was going to help you grieve through this you bypassed anger and you know like, in the different stages of grief, right, I went through yeah, was I in shock for a moment and depression and denial, but I immediately went, I bypassed it all, went to acceptance and I didn't do the layers of grief. You didn't do the work, I didn't, and so I took my baseball bat to my pillow in my bedroom and I started to bash it all out because it was a big ouch. It was a big ouch to. We just had two different life trajectories and as hard as that was to hear, it was actually if it's not right for one everybody listening to this if it's not right for one, it is not right for both. Okay, as much as we might want that.

Speaker 3 13:00

So I do believe that, while the standard layers of grief shock, denial, bargaining, anger, acceptance, all that kind of depression acceptance is really honoring all of those spaces, grieving through love instead of judgment, suffering, victim consciousness which we, what most people do when there's a loss and please forgive me as I'm generalizing this when I say they deny their feelings and self-love is all about tapping into those feelings, because that's what humanity is about. It's not an intellectual exercise, it's an emotional experience and, if I can part any wisdom to everyone that's experiencing grief right now, it's about experiencing all those emotions and letting have your day, like the child doesn't care about crying and screaming. They're not thinking about what's, you know, work the next day or whatever, they're just experiencing their feelings, and that's what I'm here to encourage everybody is to experience their feelings.

Speaker 2 14:05

Absolutely. There was so much wisdom in everything you just said that I just almost don't know where to start. I can find something, it's true, and self-love, as you mentioned, it's got to be. I love when you use the word scaffolding I think that's, and I can picture scaffolding and I can see all the parts and pieces. It's not just one thing, it's many things through your scaffolding. So I really like that. So you are a dating coach, primarily for women in midlife. Do you usually start out with a new client by working on their self-love or at least assessing it, or at least assessing it?

Emotional Scaffolding and Inner Child Work

Speaker 3 14:42

You know, the answer is yes, but in a very remedial sense, to the extent that I don't go through their past traumas and their childhood and do any real deep dive there. I do make a request that the people I work with have done some inner work before they come to me, ideally, but to that extent we do a cursory review of their past and try to identify their fears and limiting beliefs and negative patterns. Because if you have no awareness around it, it's like what's the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results? And I think the other thing is what I do as a coach is dismantle the story that we've all grown up with to some degree. I mean, I'm going to point the finger at Disney for a moment with the Cinderella story, but we are in an evolution in humanity right now where, thankfully, women aren't dependent upon men for financial survival. Now I will always say two incomes is better than one. And yet there's such a traditional scripted narrative out there that I think blocks 50% of people to attracting what they want. So there's a little bit of the dismantling of it and, most importantly, coming at the dating marketplace from your heart will yield greater results than when we operate from ego or the mind or logical and that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 16:15

Now let me be clear. When I say heart, okay, you know, it's about having a healthy heart, emotionally healthy heart that has that scaffolding, because you're going to get a couple. What is it? You're going to kiss some frog, both sides, men and women. You're going to get some frogs. It's learning not to get attached to the wrong frog and open your heart to the right frog. So what I do is I teach discernment as a tool to at least put the odds more in your favor. I'll be candid with you, kathy the dating marketplace today it's the Hunger Games.

Speaker 2 16:54

An apt description.

Speaker 3 16:56

I love it. It is the Hunger Games, and you know, working with a coach like myself is about putting the odds forever in your favor, using the line from the movie or the books. Excuse me, and I don't mean to say that in a defeatist, pessimistic point of view I think the world no longer cultivates. We're no longer in an environment where we're surrounded by people that on a regular basis and particularly those of us in midlife, are surrounded in an environment where we're interacting with people that are eligible for mating for midlife, because most of our friends are married or in a relationship and when you get to that age, you're just not around enough. Single eligible Right. And online dating was birthed, and for a while, online dating was great. It was a great tool, just like the smartphone is a great tool. But now it's an addiction and unfortunately, online dating has conditioned us into a new addiction just like I was addicted to it in those early stages after my divorce and it's time to go back to a traditional approach of connecting with people from a heart-centered place. So it ain't easy. I'm going to tell you something, kathy a couple things Dating and relationship is not for the faint of heart.

Speaker 3 18:22

I mean. You have to be willing to put your heart out there big time to get hurt kind of thing. And sadly today we almost need ninja level skills, you know, communication skills to really navigate the differences human beings have. And boy are there difference ever. I don't care what couple you're looking at. There is not one couple out there that doesn't have some differences, and some have more than others. And it is navigating those differences that require love and to some degree, a relationship is a daily grieving process. You're grieving the fantasy of love and having to deal with the reality of love.

Speaker 2 19:05

Well, that's excellent perspective. It really is. I know I used Matchcom in its very early days and you know I connected with a number of gentlemen and met them and you know most of them just kind of went on their way. There's one that I still have a somewhat casual friendship, but we're opposite ends of the country, so it's just an occasional email. After my husband died I actually told myself and even voiced it on this podcast I have absolutely no desire at all to date or find another partner. That was almost seven years ago. Now I find myself in the back of my head thinking well, the thing I really miss most about Tom is that every evening we would have conversation.

Speaker 3 19:52

Yeah.

Speaker 2 19:52

Yeah About sometimes the strangest thing. Sometimes it might be planning a vacation, planning a cruise Once in a while. It would be politics. It frequently was military history because he was retired Army. Nonetheless, it was conversation.

Speaker 3 20:07

Yeah.

Speaker 2 20:07

And that's what I miss the most.

Speaker 3 20:09

Yeah.

Speaker 2 20:10

So how likely is it, for example, that one could find a person who is only interested in occasional conversation? Well, a specific 10-1 get, I guess, is my question.

Speaker 3 20:23

Well, ok, so I'm going to be candid with you. I mean, if that's all you want is conversation, it doesn't have to be wrapped in the fortune cookie of a romantic relationship. So I mean so to answer your question. In that sense, you could find activity partners and people to have conversation with, and to some degree, a lot of people are doing it through a cyber way, whether it's text messaging, telephone calls, emails that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 20:51

I'm not a fan of that as the only source of our emotional nourishment, but it certainly can fill the space in there For romantic love. This is where it gets more complex, because, especially in your midlife, you know, many of us would like to, you know, ride off on the sunset with somebody, or grow old with somebody, that sort of thing, and it requires a lot more alignment because there's more moving parts to it. Sure, I want to honor something, though, within you, and that is you don't seem like you're operating from a place of desperation oh no and you're coming at it with kind of a full heart.

Dating After Loss in Midlife

Speaker 3 21:32

I say this because I'm guilty of dating from a desperate place. You know that I need rescuing and stuff like I'm gonna own, that I've operated from that vantage point. It's about part of self-love outside of a romantic relationship is being okay with your own company and liking your own company. And, like I will tell you, I talk to myself all the time. I have lots of conversations with myself, although I did try to talk to chat GPT I was just going to say that.

Speaker 3 22:05

I've been trying to see what that's like and you know what. It really didn't thrill me as much. I do use it as a tool, or I use it for a variety of different professional capacities, but I tried it on a personal level and it didn't land for me. Because there's this juiciness, that's the. It's the flaws of a human being that really makes the juiciness of connection. And I'll use a perfect example the movie Harry Met Sally or even the TV show Friends. Each of those characters on the TV show had their own little neuroses and things like that.

Speaker 3 22:42

That's what made them special. Sally was unique and harry fell in love with the, the picket peccadillo's of her personality.

Speaker 3 22:54

And that's where a chat she pd doesn't come to the table with her, yeah, and so even your late husband, you know like he had, you know he was more, he's very militant. You, I'm going to talk about military history and he's like I hope that he at least goes. Well, tell me something that you like I hope at least. Okay, he did that because it should be, and I, when I say the word should, if to be in, I believe healthy communication is where two people can express from the heart and two people are listening from the heart. Okay, emphasize that it's not just talking from the heart, but it's listening from the heart. And, honestly, that's a skill, that's something we have to learn, because boy is our ego fighting to be seen and validated and all this stuff.

Speaker 3 23:41

And so, even in the grieving process, when I've looked at the myriad of the losses I've had, you know, part of my experience is to be like it's almost if I wonder if the universe like created all this because I put this outward projection. See me, I'm hurt. See me, I'm hurt. See me, I'm hurt. And I'm now owning that. You know what? I'm not hurt, I'm not a victim. Yeah, a bunch of shitty things happened to me, but I'm still standing and I'm very grateful for that emotional scaffolding that's holding that Right right right Now.

Speaker 2 24:15

You may have alluded to this in one of your little pieces, but if there's a new couple and they have decided that maybe they're going to give this relationship a try Whether they met online, face to face, or whether it was from that well-intentioned friend saying I got a guy for you or I got a gal for you and we know those people exist as well Do you have any thoughts, any tips, any early warning signs that maybe this relationship is not a good idea?

Speaker 3 24:45

Well, this is a great question, and I wish I could say say this one thing ask this one question, because that's going to give you insight into it. There isn't some magic formula. However, given that most people have experienced a couple relationships in their life, in some cases there's divorce, or some cases they might have lost a beloved, or they've just had a multiple series of relationships I think our past gives us a little clue into our future, and so what you may want to get a sense of their past relationships, get some sense of that experience, and what you're looking for is really this is where you almost have to be a detective, you have to really be actively listening Do they seem stuck in the past? In other words, is there blame, is there judgment, is there criticism about their past partners? And they take no ownership as to the ending for them.

Speaker 3 25:48

Now, with the one, that's when you lose a loved one with a transition, that's not the same, but I mean, given that 75% of singles over 45 years old are divorced, you know what Most likely and so that's what you're looking for is do they take any ownership on their part to the ending of the relationship? And if they take zero ownership, that's a red flag. And look, I understand anyone listening. There are people that have been in abusive, toxic relationships.

Speaker 3 26:19

I am not discounting that one bit, but there's still some culpability and while you're looking for that some culpability, that's at least enough awareness that they go. Oh, I have to work on this for a future relationship, Because without that awareness they're just going to take their old patterns into the new relationship.

Speaker 2 26:38

Absolutely. I love that answer and, speaking as someone who has been in a toxic, violent relationship with someone who was clinically diagnosed as psychotic, I did take some ownership, and my ownership was the fact that I didn't hear enough about myself to consider how I needed to get out of this relationship. So that's my ownership.

Speaker 3 27:01

Bravo.

Speaker 2 27:03

So yeah, that possibility is there.

Empathy vs. Sympathy in New Relationships

Speaker 2 27:05

But I love your answer to kind of check on how they speak, at least about their history and the relationship that came before yours relationship or relationship because that will give you some insight, I think, into how things might go All right. One other thing now is you are newly dating or newly partnering with someone and you know that that person has lost their partner by a death, so we're talking about the most common grief that this podcast speaks of. For example, what do you have to consider about yourself to be supportive in that relationship? Does that make sense?

Speaker 3 27:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's interesting because I'm going to answer that question in like a different. I'm going to look at the prism a little differently. That's fine, that's fine. Are women that really struggled with empathy Really? Oh yeah, interesting enough.

Speaker 3 28:11

As nurturing and loving as women are, I experienced some women that had a block to empathy, in other words, because it triggered their own fear of their loss of their child. Okay, all right. And so what was interesting is I began noticing this, and I don't think there's an accident, because I think I do what I do for a living and maybe the reason why I'm still single is because I'm just meant to be a teacher and not, you know, from that vantage point. So what I began observing is what was their level of empathy around this experience? Their level of empathy around this experience? And so, when it comes to here's, the challenge in dating and relationships for midlife, particularly for women, and since I coach women is if you've lost a spouse, how empathetic is this other person to this loss?

Speaker 3 29:02

Now, men are territorial, so on some level, we want you to forget that person, we want you to, we want you to operate from a clean slate, but I believe that if you lost a spouse and a person can be empathetic, knowing, hey, you know who passed away. I wouldn't want to date you because I think you're still stuck in the past, kind of thing, right? So, as the person wanting to go out with a person who lost someone, I'm looking for is some level of empathy, knowing, hey, I'm going to have a bad day and I might be thinking of my beloved I was with for 32 years and, yes, that is part of this experience. Can you hold space for me? And that's what I'd probably be looking for and, honestly, I've never answered that question before, kathy. So I really appreciate it because I did this on the fly, but I feel like that, I feel true in my heart that that's the way to operate.

Speaker 2 30:19

Well, that answer you may want to. Once this podcast is released, you may want to go back and listen to it and write it down, because that, to me, was textbook perfect. That is exactly what I think you need to look for in that other person.

Speaker 1 30:29

Yeah.

Speaker 2 30:30

Is that empathy?

Speaker 3 30:31

Because that's going to be Not sympathy, not sympathy, nothing else. Empathy, empathy, yes, yes. No, you didn't say that, but I want to emphasize this to everyone. I got a lot of sympathy for the loss of my son, but there were only a few people that could really be empathetic to it.

Speaker 2 30:47

Yes, no, I agree 100%. I think, empathy in this situation and I'm going to remember that and that is going to get used in other podcasts. I'll tell you that right now. Oh, I gave you two things you did, but I will attribute it to you.

Speaker 1 31:01

Okay, well, sadly, our time is winding down.

Speaker 2 31:02

So this is the point in my podcast where I actually turn the microphone over to my guests and this is your opportunity to. So this is the point in my podcast where I actually turn the microphone over to my guests and this is your opportunity to speak directly to the listeners, tell them a little bit about your services, what you might offer them, anything you want to tell them, without me interrupting with a question. The floor is yours.

Closing Thoughts on Self-Nurturing

Speaker 3 31:22

Well, first I have to honor and acknowledge you, kathy. This has been a blast for me. You really actually this has been a real treat. So I just want to first honor you, know, and you're a great interviewer. So thank you For those listening.

Speaker 3 31:36

If anything I said resonated with you, if you feel like this could help you in your life. First off, if you want to connect with me, kathy will have a bunch of links that will take you to my website. It'll take you to my YouTube channel. I'm sure it'll take you a few other places you can certainly click. If this did make a difference in your life, I'd love it if you'd write me a note and go to my website and write a message there. You can just click the link to contact me. That would mean a lot to me.

Speaker 3 32:04

But more importantly, I want to just impart everyone, when we think of the word love, romantic love, agape love, all the different forms of love. Ultimately one of the hardest things we can do is turn that inward and just nurture that little six-year-old inside of us. So I just invite everybody to consciously take care of that little six-year-old, if you can, every day, because you know what? Life ain't easy, man, it ain't easy. There's a lot of loss and grief. But just like a child, if we nurture that little six-year-old inside of us, just like Kathy is happy every day. Hopefully we can feel the same.

Speaker 2 32:39

So that's my invitation for everyone yeah, I wonder, maybe should I name my child inside me.

Speaker 3 32:45

Oh, I have a name for mine.

Speaker 2 32:47

Oh, anything you can share, yeah Well, nevermind, nevermind. I don't want to know, I don't want to.

Speaker 3 32:53

Let me just say this I have parts of me and I immediately went to that part of me, my shadow. I don't have a name for my sweet little six-year-old other than my own name.

Speaker 2 33:03

Well, that whole idea of an inner child resonates, because sometimes in my podcasts I ask what may be the simplest question of all, and I always call it my toddler question because I remember my kids asking those questions. That should be just so obvious. But at any rate. So, jonathan, thank you again for taking the time. You have said so many things that I know are going to resonate with our listeners and I just know that many, including myself, are going to go back and take a second listen, because sometimes you just kind of get caught up in conversation and you think wait, what did he say about? So that's one of the nice things about podcasts is you can do that To our listeners. Thank you for taking the time for tuning in again.

Speaker 2 33:47

This podcast, like some of the others, is part of our special series of Weekend With, so I hope you like the fact that this is an extra episode, a bonus, if you will, because this topic, this perspective, I think, is something that we really, really need to listen to. We need to hear it, we need to consider it, we need to take it to heart and, along with the self-care that I'm always preaching, I am now going to add self-love. They're both very important. So please take care of yourselves and tune in again next time, as we all continue to live and grieve.

Speaker 1 34:23

Thank you so much for listening with us today. Do you have a topic that you'd like us to cover or do you have a question from one of our episodes? Please email us at info at asiliveandgrievecom and let us know. We hope you will find a moment to leave a review, send an email and share with others. Join us next time as we continue to live and grieve together.