How To Recognize Hidden Grief, Finally Heal + Resiliency with Victoria Volk (Part 1)

Grief doesn’t always show up as tears at a funeral. Sometimes it shows up as rage in the checkout line, a body that feels like it’s failing you, or a quiet belief that you have to handle everything alone. We sit down with Victoria, owner of Unleashed Heart LLC, an advanced certified grief recovery specialist and end-of-life doula who brings a rare mix of evidence-based grief work and holistic healing tools like Reiki and biofield tuning.

Victoria shares the personal losses that shaped her early life and how those experiences can echo for years as emotional dysregulation, depression-like symptoms, and strained relationships. We unpack the grief myths many of us inherit like “be strong,” “stay busy,” and “just replace the loss,” plus why grief is bigger than death. Friendship endings, identity shifts, lost safety, and unmet hopes and expectations can all be legitimate grief triggers, and ignoring them often creates a heavier load over time.

We also get practical about grief recovery and resilience. We talk self-awareness, reflection, journaling to spot repeating patterns, and what it looks like to choose support instead of white-knuckling it. If you’re navigating trauma, burnout, chronic stress, or a season of change, this conversation offers language, validation, and next steps.

The Quiet Gift: A Journey of Self Worth and Resilience is now available for download as an audible.  Check it out!

Transcript

Reignite Resilience Opens The Door

SPEAKER_01 0:06

All of us reach a point in time where we are depleted and need to somehow find a way to reignite the fire within. But how do we spark that flame? Welcome to Reignite Resilience, where we will venture into the heart of the human spirit. We'll discuss the art of reigniting our passion and strategies to stoke our enthusiasm. And now here are your hosts, Natalie Davis and Pamela Cass.

SPEAKER_03 0:42

Welcome back to another episode of Reignite Resilience. I am your co-host Natalie Davis and so excited to be back with all of you. And joining me, of course, is your co-host Pam Cass. Hello, Pam. How are you?

A Travel Mishap And Big Laughs

SPEAKER_02 0:54

I am fantastic. This is my one of my favorite days of the year. I get to volunteer at Special Olympics. So I've been, I got a little bit of red, red because it was, I was outside the whole day today with these amazing kids and family. And then I'm kind of giggling because you and I used to travel a lot together, and we've both been busy, and so we've not. And so we did a conference this week. And in true Natalie and Pam style, there are always shenanigans that happen. And so I just want to share the story of how I was on a coaching call in our room and I had my AirPods in, and you got stuck in the bathroom. The door, it's a it was a it was a barn door. Yes. And the barn door, and I had no idea this was going on.

SPEAKER_03 1:42

It's it's one of those moments where you start to like contemplate, like, okay, what is gonna actually happen? Am I gonna spend the rest of the day in the bathroom? And I like start like anxious sweating. I'm like, I need to get out of here. And I'm using my entire body weight, broke two nails, trying to slide the door back, and it completely fell off the tracks. And I'm like, yeah, if it could have been a comedy scheme, it totally would have. I'm like leaving in the bedroom and she's just unbeknownst to her. I'm just a duck.

SPEAKER_02 2:15

The power of AirPods, you know, I didn't I didn't hear a thing. I was completely laser focused on my client. Yeah, and I come up and I'm like, what's all this? Why did you tell me if it was the drywall from the ceiling that had been like, yes, just boring?

SPEAKER_03 2:32

Well, you know, I give in my Herculean strength. It scraped all the drywall off the ceiling. But you know what? The hotel staff was amazing. They came and quickly got it fixed. But yeah, I for a moment there I thought I was gonna spend the entire day in the bathroom. I had a very anxious moment.

unknown 2:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:48

It just it just makes me laugh because when that I when I was thinking about it this week, kind of like processing our week together, I was just like, I think we have things happen on every one of our trips. There's never there's never any like drama or anger or anything. It's always a lot of laughter because we're like and we just left the room for the day as if nothing happened.

SPEAKER_03 3:11

I you were like, what is this? Is it its drama? Well, it's fine, let's go. We're good.

SPEAKER_02 3:16

Let's go. We got things to do. So this is these are the days of our lives. Oh my gosh. It's amazing.

Meet Victoria And Her Work

SPEAKER_03 3:23

It's the fun times. These are the things that you just that this is why. If you ever see me out in public by myself and I just start giggling in a corner all by myself, it's because I'm remembering these types of things. That's what's happening. Oh my god. Well, we have an amazing guest that's joining us today, and I am so excited to connect with her. Um, I'm gonna give it to you, Pam. Let our listeners know who's joining us today. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 3:48

So today we have Victoria, the owner of the Unleashed Heart LLC. She is an advanced certified grief recovery specialist, self-published author, Reiki master certified UMAP coach, which I want to find more out about that, a certified biofield tuning practitioner, and end-of-life doula through evidence-based grief programs, life path coaching, her podcast, Grieving Voices, and Distant Healing Sessions. Victoria offers holistic support to those who want to go from surviving to thriving. Welcome to our podcast. We are so excited to have you here today. And I think you have such a what you do is such an incredible thing that every one of us will go through at some point in our lives. So I'd love for you to share with us what journey kind of got you to where you are today, because it's not something that you hear much about.

Childhood Loss Trauma And Anger

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Well, thank you for having me. This is my first interview with two hosts, co-hosts. So this is fun. Yeah, so grief has been part of my life since I was a child. My my mother's mother, my grandmother, had been diagnosed with melanoma when I was about six or seven, and she passed away, but she had lived with us for a short period of time or stayed with us and passed away. And within a year, my because my father had also been going through cancer, and he was stage four colon cancer, and he passed away when I was eight. So by the time I was eight, my mother had lost her mother and her husband, and actually, maybe six years before my grandmother, she lost her father because he died the year I was born. I never did meet him. So within a span of six years, my mother lost both of her parents and her husband. And there was a five-year age gap between me and my brother, a nine-year age gap between me and my sister. And then I have a half-brother who's quite a few, like 15 years older than me. So I was the youngest of four when my dad passed, and so I kind of had to just raise myself because I was kind of the latchkey kid, and my brother was off doing his own thing. He was a teenager, and and so I raised myself essentially, and it was tough, there were so tough years, but uh also during that time I had been molested, and I didn't share that with my mother until I was a teenager, and how she responded to that was remaining friends with that family, which was really hurtful, and I didn't understand that. You know, that was something my 14-year-old brain just couldn't wrap my head around. So you can imagine by the time I was in my early 20s, I had a lot of resentment and anger. I was angry at God, I just was full of rage. I was in an unhealthy relationship three years too long. I was actually in that relationship for five years, but it was three years too long. And I had been abusing alcohol. My life was kind of getting off the tracks. I license should have been suspended, but it was almost suspended. I should have lost my job. I should have been fired at that time because I was tardy a lot or had to call in because I was hungover. So yeah, in my early 20s, I was kind of um making up for my good girl persona that I had kept up as a young child because I didn't want to rock the boat, I didn't want to add any stress to my mother. I kind of just became a lone wolf as a young child and into adulthood that translated into me not really knowing how to ask for help or even bothering to ask for help. It's you know, this mindset that, you know, I can do it myself, I'll do it myself. No one's coming to save me anyway, right? And that really was to my detriment. And I did try, I did go to a therapist, I tried hypnotherapy a couple times, but that actually gave me the courage to actually leave that relationship. So that was a positive. And yeah, it took me till I was 40. I mean, it was another 20 years before I actually discovered something that would transform my life and actually address my grief. Because when I was in the self-publishing and editing phase of my book, I had another loss. Actually, my mother had told me my uncle had been diagnosed with brain cancer and he was in the hospital. He was the closest sibling my my father had. Like that was his brother, they were really close. When my father passed away, I also lost that entire side of the family. They were no longer in my life either. So in one fell swoop, I lost my dad, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole family. Fast forward 30 years, my uncle's diagnosed with brain cancer. I went in to see him, not knowing if he'd want to see me, if he'd remember me, but I just felt this. It was like this instantaneous draw when I found out he had cancer that not even for myself, but I felt like he needed to see me, like he needed that closure. He needed something from me that only I could give him. Something from his past was like eating away at him. Like I just felt this. I suppose I felt like maybe it was my dad like pushing me, like you need to do this. And so I went to see him, and what happened was we reconnected over the course of six months, and I felt closer to my father than I had since he passed. I just felt a lot of closure in that experience. I feel like he did too. And that's when I realized, yeah, this is grief because it brought up everything from my past. And I think that's what happens for a lot of people, particularly around midlife. We have another loss, and we realize that everything we've long carried 40 years before, however many years into midlife before, starts to take its toll. Like we realize, we connect these dots. I think that, okay, this is really my issue. Now, whether we decide to take action on that is the defining factor, right? Like, will I resort to what I know, and that is how to respond to grief, which is probably unhelpful or hurtful because that's what we do. We resort to what we know, and what we know is what we learn from our parents and generations before. And usually that's let's replace the loss, let's keep busy, let's be strong. I have to be strong for everyone else, be strong for myself, you know, all these myths of grief that I think we all kind of fall back to because that we don't know any better. And I definitely did that myself. And when you know better, you can take different action. It's new knowledge, new information. That's how we make different choices and different decisions. I mean, we can you can still make the same choice and decision, right? That you always have. But there's a level of shame then I think to that because not necessarily shame, I think maybe it's even subconscious or unconscious, but it's like the fear just takes over. Like you would rather sit in what's familiar, which is the pain, than deal with the uncertainty of what it's going to mean if I actually address this, this pain, this emotional pain.

SPEAKER_02 11:02

So when you went through this with your uncle, so you showed up and you had a period of time with him, and you said that was when you felt really close to your dad. Were there things that you learned, or is that kind of the catalyst that got you into the coaching and becoming a doula?

Midlife Triggers And Replacing Loss

SPEAKER_00 11:21

That didn't actually come for another two years. Okay. At the time when I was self-published my book, I had just been blogging. Like that's when I really like my personal development journey started around 2014. And that's coincidentally, when my youngest started kindergarten and I was closing a business that I had poured everything into for almost 10 years. And so all of my identity had been wrapped up in being a work-at-home, stay-at-home mom, and having my business. And and I was just like, what now? And I replaced the loss and I told my husband, I said, I need a dog. I need a dog. And he thought it was the most ridiculous thing, but I came to him in tears and I thought, this is going to this is going to save me. A dog is going to save me. It's going to give me a distraction. It's going to give me a purpose. I'm going to find the perfect dog. I'm going to train this dog so it's the best dog. Because we tried to adopt a couple, we we did adopt a couple rescue dogs, and that did not work out. My kids were young, kind of too young. Like, I didn't know how to pick a dog, right? Like, I think that's that's three-fourths of the battle is knowing how to choose a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_03 12:32

That's the key piece.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

Choosing the right breed. Choosing the right breed, the right dog, like, yeah, all those things. Like, yeah, the personality, right? Like, if you're not like an amped up, a lot of energy, ton of energy, energy person that just loves to like go, go, go, do not get a dog that loves to lay on your lap and not or vice versa.

SPEAKER_03 12:57

Exactly.

Grief Recovery Training And Breakthrough

SPEAKER_00 12:58

Feeling more chill and laid back. Do not get like, you know, like a German Shepherd or like a Terrier. Yes, exactly. So I did get the dog. I did train the dog, and he's perfect, and we've had him for 12 years, and I'm gonna cry my eyes out the day he dies. But but yeah, anyway, so replaced the loss, got the dog, life was good, and then I had another lot, like a friendship. Like, you know, like one of those people you meet that's like a kindred spirit. And I think sometimes even losing a friendship can be almost harder. So it's one of the hardest relationships, I think, to reconcile in your mind. Because some oftentimes you don't get closure with that. You don't, you just are left hanging sometimes with not knowing what happened. But with this one, I knew that in hindsight now, I know that it was my own projections, it was my own where I was was not where she was. Like we were on completely different planes of our growth and spirituality and all that. I was still playing catch up, and she was further along. So yeah, I lost that friendship, and I was like, oh my gosh, here I go again. It's like here I go again on my own. So I played it in my head. Like, what the hell's wrong with me? Like, I feel so screwed up. Again, this is like five years, 50 something. Yeah, like five years after I've been really into personal development and stuff, and like I'd taken every personality test known to man by that point. And again, it just comes back to this is grief. This is grief. I hadn't dealt with my uncle passing because that opened up a lot of wounds, right? And now this friendship, and and I just feel really messed up. Like it's me, it's all me. And yeah, went to Google, phone grief recovery, signed up, knew this was meant for me, and the training got canceled. I'm like, you have got to be kidding me. And it was like the universe testing me, like, how bad do you want it? So I went to Austin, Texas. I spent way more and invested more than I would have had to, needed to. And I could have just said, screw it, I'll just read the book and try and heal myself, which I did. In between the first training getting canceled and the second deciding to go to the second one, I got ordered the book that we use to facilitate the program, and it's full of doggy ears and post-it notes and highlighting, and I'm like, I'm gonna help people heal. And not thinking like I knew in the back of my mind this would help me, but it was like still, I had this like it was a mission. Like, I'm gonna help people in their grief. If I got this licked, you know, but get down there, I go to the I start first day, I wake up sicker than a dog, both ends. And I was like, this is the universe again. Like, what the heck is happening? I had met a woman on the tour bus the night before training was to start, and she was there for a life coaching conference, and we ate at the same place. We ate, had the very exact same meal. I texted her that next day, and I'm like, I am sicker than a dog. Are you? And she's like, No, not at all. So, what I can surmise and what I have been told through the years that these people have done this training, there's always, there are always people that it's like the purge before the purge, and that what my body knew what was coming. And I cannot even describe to you being in that experience. It was like, because when you go through the training, it's over the course of four days. Granted, it's a typically it's an eight-week program, nine-week program, and we do it in four days. There is a two-day, like it's very condensed, and it's you're drinking from a fire hose, and you are processing like it's like I could not even imagine like so. You're taking in all this information, but yet all the same time processing your own stuff because you're doing you're going through what other what you're gonna be taking people through. And I just it was like 30 years of anger and rage just came out in tears, and I didn't think I could cry anymore. I didn't think it was possible. And the person I was before I went there and the person I came home as were very two different people, and it was like a boulder had been lifted off of my shoulders. That's literally what it felt like. I felt so light, and it's just been a peeling the onion ever since. Because once that happens, once you peel off like this big layer, like it only reveals more. So there's no going back. Yeah, there is no going back. You can't unknow it. No, it's a journey, I think, that now I will be on till the end of my days, right? Like it's because relationships, we live in the context of relationships, whether it's your coworkers, your boss, your neighbors, your friends, your lover, your best friend, like whoever, right? Like we are in relationship with people, the relationship with yourself, your inner child. And then you can extend that out to like m intangible things like money, body image.

SPEAKER_02 18:11

Fill in the blank.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

Yeah, yeah. So many things. And that's what I've used this work to help me process through is those intangible losses as well. Loss of security, safety, like those were huge. Like I lost those very early on, right? And so I had a lot to process and work through. And it's still, it's still, I'm I think we're always a work in progress. That's the thing that I think people forget about healing, is that it can feel daunting because when I say it's never ending, it's never ending. It really is never ending because life continues to life. There's always going to be something to work on or or process, or you know, people are a a mirror, they are mirrors for us, always reflecting back to us where we are wounded. And holy shit, did parenting not show me that? Like seriously.

Grief Myths And The Body’s Signals

SPEAKER_02 19:01

Nobody prepared us, nobody prepared us for that that journey at all. No, no. Victoria, so you went through this program, four-day intensive. Looking back now, were there keys or things that were showing up in your life that you didn't recognize as suppressed grief?

SPEAKER_00 19:20

Absolutely, and actually that's kind of what set off my personal development too, was that I at the same time I was just going from doctor to doctor and trying to figure out like I had physical manifestations. Like, so I had dropped a lot of weight, my iron was really, really low, my hair was falling out, I was I looked sick. Like I looked, I looked like, yeah, and and honestly, my self-care. Three days without showering, that was the norm. It's like a deep depression, but I but I don't know that it was depression because maybe it was. I don't I don't even know. But it was grief. That's what I'll say. It was grief, you know what I mean? That's why I never said it like that. I never really connected that dot. But like so, I think too, like maybe so many people think they're just they're depressed or that it's depression, but it's grief. How much of it is grief? Because trauma is what happens, grief is what's left, and grief is the loss of hopes, dreams, and expectations. It's anything that you wish would have been or could be different, better, or more. And that's a lot more than just death. No one has to die for us to grieve. So if we think about that definition, probably grieving a lot, you know. And we think of when we're growing up as children, losing that first dog or that first pet, and then the parents are like, oh, that's okay, we can get another dog. Right? Or, you know, your best friend, your best friend as a child moves away. Well, that, you know, yeah, it's gonna suck, you know, but you'll meet new people, you'll make more friends. You know, so we just keep collecting these rocks and we put them in our backpack, and each rock is just more weight that we're carrying, more emotional weight that we're not shown and given the tools how to process and how to sit with and and work through. And children naturally know how to do that. Like young children know how to do that. It's the adults that like shut it down because it makes them uncomfortable. They don't know how to deal with their own craps, and then we shut the child down.

SPEAKER_02 21:23

Like, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Don't talk about that. It makes me uncomfortable. You don't say it that way, but you know. Well, or you know, oh put your tears away.

SPEAKER_02 21:32

It's fine, you're good, toughen through. I think we've been programmed to just bury the grief and just move on because that's like your badge of of strength. And I think we've come to this place where we feel like, well, I can't show my weakness. That's weakness. I exactly. I could deprive as a child. I can't tell my friends that I am like, I may all look all put together on the outside, but I am just like crumbling behind the scenes because you know, that's that's weakness. Right. We're got this. So I think especially women, I would say we've been in this new age where now we're in the workforce and I think we've been trained. Oh, there's no crying in the office. There's, you know, so we just bury everything. And it shows up, like you said. Or if you're emotional honest, then you're too much. You're too much. You're too emotional. Like, oh, she's super emotional. Like you don't want to be, yeah, it's it's uh it's our thing. When we don't deal with it, our body, our body keeps the score.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

Well, we're like a tea kettle. We either implode or we explode. So we either have physical manifestations, we can have migraines, we can have fibromyalgia, which I think is really just grief. We can have all these different weird things, right? With no idiot, they're idiopathic. They find no reason or no cause for them. And I think a lot of the times it's just grief or you know, heart. Like how many people die of a literal broken heart, right? Or we're exploding everywhere around us. We're angry at the checkout line, we're angry at our spouse, we're yelling at our kids. And that's that was me. I was angry. I had a lot of anger and I spewed it out and I projectile vomited my anger everywhere. So we either implode or explode.

Self Awareness Journaling And Getting Support

SPEAKER_02 23:14

What are ways we can recognize it in ourselves when we're like, okay, this is I'm off a little bit. I wonder what's behind this. Are there things that we can look for? Are there things that you recommend we do either physically, emotionally, fill in the blank to help when you are feeling in that space?

SPEAKER_00 23:32

Well, I think with self-aware, that is the key to the key of any healing is self-awareness. We, like Dr. Phil used to say, we can't change what we don't acknowledge, right? It's so true. I mean, the first step I think is acknowledging it, that you have a problem, that this is an issue, that I am emotionally dysregulated. And why is that? What has happened in my life that is causing me to react rather than respond to life in this way? How why am I showing up to my relationships this way? What is happening within me? In fact, I mean, just like we have to give ourselves the time and space to self-reflect. But there's so much gold there. There's so much gold in just how asking ourselves, how did I get here? I'm looking at that personally right now with my my fitness journey. I'm like up and I'm like doing awesome. I'm like, I was just looking at my stats, like 39, 22 weeks, 39 weeks. I'll do a program, I'm doing awesome, things are great, I'm feeling great. Life happens, I get off the train, and I really get off the train. Right? Like it's that's been the cycle of my life. Like, I'm I'm really getting in, I get into fitness, I take care of myself, and then something happens, and I totally self-destruct. And that's the pattern I'm working on right now. And I literally just went through my journal and I corresponded it, matched it up to my stats when things started to shift, and holy shit, my husband and my mother had a falling out. There was a lot of emotional stuff happening there, just a lot of emotional different area, different areas of my life kind of culminating all at the same time. I was going through health issues actually. I ended up, I my digestive system was like totally on the fretz. And ended up having a colonoscopy, which I'm glad I did. Honestly, it was like I probably saved, honestly, it probably saved my life because my dad died of colon cancer. So ever since I was 33, I every five years I have a colonoscopy, and I've had polyps removed every single time. I feel like I'm running away from cancer. My grandmother died of melanoma. I've had a precancerous mole removed. So it's like, okay, I just trying to outrun it, right? So this colonoscopy happens, and thank goodness it did because it was a nasty one. And precancerous, it likely would have turned into cancer just because of the size and where it was and all that, and the the kind it was. And I wasn't due for another two years. So had I waited another two years, who knows? I had one three years ago, and it was already to that size, it was already considered large. So now I'm gonna go in three years instead of five. But I'm just saying, like I was having these physical things happening, and thank again, thank goodness I did, because I probably wouldn't have really, you know, done anything and or maybe connected the dots. I actually thought it was an irritable bowel flare-up in it, but it was just going on and on and on. But anyway, that to say, I think it's important that we we look at, we have to look at the past to see how we got to where we are, because it didn't happen overnight. It's it's these daily choices, these daily decisions that we make. It's like compound interests, right? Like every little bit, and it works with self-destruction too, right? It's these daily decisions that we make. So I think the only way to know, to get laser focused on what is the issue here, is to look at what's been the issue. And then finding support, getting a game plan. I've found support. I start in two weeks with my support system to get that back on track and address, really address like why this, why I do the things I do when it comes to my fitness and self-care, really, in terms of my health.

Key Takeaways And Closing

SPEAKER_01 27:42

So thank you for joining us today on the Reignite Resilience podcast. We hope you had some aha moments and learned a few new real life ideas to fuel the flames of passion. Please subscribe on your favorite streaming platform, like or download your favorite episodes, and of course, share with your friends and family. We look forward to seeing you again next time on Reignite Resilience.