Trauma Talks : With Russ Tellup
Hi, Iām Russ Tellup, a Trauma-Informed Somatic Coach and Level 1 Brainspotting practitioner. In my podcast "Trauma Talks," I dive into the neuroscience of trauma, exploring somatic healing practices, Polyvagal Theory, and IFS (Internal Family Systems) parts work. I also occasionally address the complexities of narcissistic abuse, offering insights and tools for healing. Join me each week as we navigate the journey of recovery, resilience, and self-discovery together.
Trauma Talks : With Russ Tellup
Embracing Grief: Transformative Healing Through Trauma and Faith. An Interview with Chris Mamone
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Imagine viewing the toughest moments of your life as "gifts in crappy wrapping paper." That's exactly the paradigm shift grief and acceptance coach Chris Mamone has embraced. This week, Chris joins us to share his transformative journey from personal trauma to becoming a beacon of hope for others. Through profound losses, including the stillbirth of his son, Chris found a path to self-acceptance and a mission to guide others through their darkest times. His story is a testament to the strength found in confronting one's hardships and learning from them.
Our conversation with Chris underscores the importance of acknowledging and processing emotions as an essential step in healing. By sharing his deeply personal experiences, Chris reveals how he identified and shed toxic influences in his life, gaining deeper compassion and empathy. He offers insights into how coaching and the study of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) have equipped him to help others navigate the turbulent waters of grief. Chris also candidly discusses how moments of physical injury have catalyzed emotional healing, emphasizing the necessity of creating safe spaces for people to express and process their grief.
Listeners are invited to explore the intersection of faith and personal growth with Chris, who recounts a life-changing spiritual experience that reshaped his life's trajectory. From selling his house to starting a coaching business, Chris's journey illustrates the power of divine reassurance in guiding one's path through grief and trauma. We wrap up with a grounding exercise designed to help manage triggers and foster a sense of safety, emphasizing the importance of finding a supportive community in the healing process.
š Learn more about Chris and his transformative coaching work at AcceptanceCoach.com.
Join us for an episode filled with inspiration, practical guidance, and a heartfelt exploration of healing through trauma and grief.
Welcome to Trauma Talks. My name is Russ. I'm your host. Happy Thanksgiving. I'm so thankful that I get to share this information with you guys each week and hopefully make a difference in the world. I'm thankful for all of you for listening, and my family. Thank you for everything that you do to support me and love me.
Speaker 1:So today's episode we are interviewing Chris Mamone. Chris is a grief and acceptance coach with acceptancecoachcom. He is a fabulous guy. He's got an amazing story of healing and how he went about it and then some of the things that he's kind of getting his fingers into to to help others do it as well. So, um, check them out and uh, hope you guys enjoy the interview and we'll talk to you right afterwards. Thanks, hey there everybody. My name is Russ. I'm a trauma-informed somatic life coach with BrainSpot in Colorado Springs and I've got a guest with me today, chris Mamone. Chris is an acceptance coach and the owner of acceptancecoachcom. He is a coach that works directly with trauma. His trauma specifically came from the stillbirth of his son about two years ago, and I'll let him talk about it and kind of throw you guys some information. Go ahead, chris, let's hear about it.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone and thanks for introducing me, Russ. So a little bit about myself. I'm an acceptance coach and many of you are probably wondering what that means. Self-acceptance is a big part of my grief and healing journey that I've had and it's something that's helped me heal through my traumas. So I've started a life coaching business, which has been a long passion of mine for many years, and I decided to focus on helping people discover self-acceptance and to help them heal through grief and loss and trauma.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Can you give us a little bit of history, kind of what led you to doing this?
Speaker 2:I definitely can. So back in 2017, I was not in a great place. I was depressed with life and I was working a job I didn't like, and things were just not working the way I wanted to and I'll get told I'm crazy for this but within a matter of about 15 minutes, I spent $3,000 and hired a coach, and I had no idea what to expect. I mean, I paid it and I said, holy crap, what am I doing? Is this even going to work? I don't even know what to expect.
Speaker 2:I had all those racing thoughts people get when they hear coaching. Little did I know, because I've had a coach now since then, having somebody by your side that can hold you accountable, that would be there to journey with you and you can think about it as mountain climbers that are tied up on a rope together, going up the mountain, traveling that journey together. A coach was exactly what I needed on my journey, and I was able to pull out of a lot of bad places in life and change my mindset, learn how to heal from things in my past, and I became freer because of that one decision. That really scared me in that moment, and so I'm forever grateful for making that choice.
Speaker 1:Cool. Was there specific things that this coach was doing with you that had the big impact, or was it just the fact that you had like an outside set of eyes, kind of on what was going on and helped you process things?
Speaker 2:So I will say this my coach I ended up becoming friends with, but he was the kind of guy that when we were on a coaching call and I was going through some hard times, it was not a feel sorry for you conversation. It was really we're going to look at this for exactly what it is not what you think it is and you got to go do the hard work. And so we had a lot of hard accountability conversations and I did a lot of uncomfortable things that I didn't even know what I was doing half the time. But my coach would give me direction and give me advice and give me counsel on what I needed to do and what steps I needed to take. And if I did have setbacks, he was always there to say here's where we're going to shift course and work towards it.
Speaker 1:Nice, that's awesome. We're going to shift course and work towards it. Nice, that's awesome. So you had some losses over the last four or five years. Could you speak to that a bit?
Speaker 2:Definitely so. My first real loss experience was pretty traumatic. My grandfather had terminal cancer from about 2017. He passed away in August 2020. I actually relocated across the country the last year. He was ill for work and whatnot.
Speaker 2:And I came home because I got a call that he wasn't doing well, and so I came home and, long story short, he passed away in my arms two days after I flew home and I I'll just say that I was very I've never experienced anything that tragic before. It really will reshape you as a person if you experience that, um. But what happened basically at that at that point is, um, I, I went through a big depression for three or four months. Uh, my grandfather was my dad and my grandpa.
Speaker 2:I didn't have dad's picture growing up, um, and so I chose in that moment after my grandfather died, that I've said this can either define me and break me, or I can say that there's gifts, lessons and blessings in this moment that happened to me, and so I chose to celebrate him every day in my life and I always think about him. I always, you know, when I do woodworking, I'd always have him on my mind. So I chose to take that terrible thing and make it a blessing. The next thing that I went through is I lost my child to stillborn in 2022. And you know, my son was very healthy and he had a great heartbeat and one day it just stopped and we still don't have answers why it happened.
Speaker 1:You still don't to this day.
Speaker 2:huh yeah, stillborn a lot of people don't know there's, huh yeah, stillborn. A lot of people don't know there's just not a lot of causes behind it. The doctors can figure out why it happens, um, and so the same kind of thing that was hard for that was I had to watch my wife go through that process and that was really really hard. Um, but holding my son. What was kind of weird in the hospital was is it was a very sad and very tragic thing to me, but I could not stop smiling when I held my son. For some reason, I felt at peace and I don't know how to. I don't know how to explain that, but I felt so much, so much love out of my child and, for those of you that are have faith in religion, I really felt like I got to touch a child who is pure of love out of the universe They've not been tainted by sin of the world and it's just.
Speaker 2:It was a beautiful, beautiful, sad moment in my life and I was faced with that same challenge again of do I let this define me and say that this horrible thing happened and you know, do I get upset and everything about it, or do I say that this had meaning and purpose in my life and how can I celebrate my son in my life.
Speaker 2:And when I lost my child, I made those choices a lot faster than I did with my grandfather passing, but I did it because I wanted. I saw an innocent baby who's not with us in the world today and I said I've got to share his story with people because his little life has so much more meaning beyond where I'm at in my life and he can help other people going through the same thing or going through something similar. His story can help others. And so I really focused on the same thing that his life had gifts and blessings and lessons that I needed to learn in life. And ever since then, everything good that comes my way has been a result of choices I made when he passed. So I'm very grateful for him. As much as I miss him and I love him a lot, I'm very grateful for that experience that he gave me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, my brother had a similar experience with a son that was miscarried. He wasn't stillborn but he was miscarried, but very, very impactful. It really hit him pretty hard but it sounds like you've turned it into a really beautiful thing. Can you, can you talk about kind of what you're doing now in the trauma space and to help others through the similar circumstances?
Speaker 2:Yeah, right now, what I'm focused on doing for people in my acceptance coaching business is helping them work through grief and trauma and loss, and something that is very big in the loss community is that we always say that there's no such thing as moving on.
Speaker 2:I hear that phrase a lot from people and I get irked in my stomach all the time, because we, as humans, as emotions, and I don't care if you're a man, a woman, whatever you may be, I don't care because we all have emotions and we have feelings and we have sensitivities to things that happen in our experience of life, regardless of who you are.
Speaker 2:And so moving on is a really outdated mentality that I don't like because it hides those people's feelings from themselves. And so my job as a coach is to say there's moving forward in grief, and not moving on, but moving forward, and what that means is is that that grief and that loss will always be a part of you. It will never go away, and those feelings are going to come to you, by the way, in waves. Um, I can tell you, uh, after I lost my grandfather, even after I lost my son, I can tell you the weirdest thing after I lost my kid was every 23rd of the month. His birthday was the 23rd of September every 23rd of the month for about a year.
Speaker 2:I would just feel angry for no reason. I just I would be upset. I couldn't be happy that day and I never really figured it out much until that year period. I said that's my grief coming in, that's my grief talking to me, that's my grief saying there's something you need to hear right now, there's something you need to feel and you need to allow yourself space to feel those things. And so when I would have those waves of moments of anger that came, I knew it was the grief talking. I knew it was my love for my son coming out. It wasn't anger, it was love and grief for him.
Speaker 2:And so if there's something I could share with people listening to this podcast and you're going through grief or trauma right now and you're trying to figure out how to heal that, you've got lots of emotions going on or maybe you have that where you're, you're fine for a week and then you feel really angry the next day Know that that's your grief and your love for something coming out. It's not that you're angry or you've got a problem of some kind. It's letting your grief come through and to feel that and appreciate it in the moment, because it really is trying to communicate with you and that can be a big step in your healing journey yeah, and you met.
Speaker 1:You mentioned your wife earlier. I'm assuming that your wife has to be super supportive of everything you're doing. Right, she's been very supportive of me. Yeah, yeah. So if you could verbalize or contextualize kind of the changes that you've undergone over the course of the last two years, how would you verbalize that?
Speaker 2:I have. That's a have. That's a lot. It's probably a lot for this podcast, but I'll summarize this. When I lost my child, there was a lot of things in my life that weren't working, and that was a lot of job stuff I had a lot of. I had toxic family members that just were not going to get. They were not healthy for me to be around. That's another topic for trauma healing.
Speaker 2:But but what I'll share with you, as I sat down one day when I wasn't feeling the best and I sat down and said what don't I like about my life right now? What do I like? What can I remove out of my life that's not serving me, it doesn't have a purpose, it puts me in a bad place, not in the place I want to be. Because of my son, I can tell you this, I changed my life 180 degrees. I can tell you, I learned a lot about compassion. I learned a lot about empathy. I learned a lot about grief healing. I learned a lot about working through trauma and I also learned that our life and our journeys which is part of my coaching business, by the way is a self-acceptance journey. It's not linear, it's not a perfect process. It's not a step one, two, three, four. It can be a step, you know, step eight, step two, step four, step five.
Speaker 2:It's going to be, out of order for you and everybody's different, and so I learned a lot through that process and I've changed as a person and I've actually become a. I've become a great coach because of these experiences in life, and I call them uh, you know, for lack of better term, I call them the gifts and crappy wrapping paper. Um, if you guys have ever gotten a really good analogy.
Speaker 1:I like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, if you guys think about it for one moment, you know think about a.
Speaker 2:Christmas and, um, you know, don't trash your family members or anything. I'm just saying think about a time that you got a gift that has a really weird graphing paper, or it was a gift that you were just like I don't know what this is, like, what, why think about that for a second, what that feeling is, and then think about, wow, you know what. That actually turned into a funny story years later, or, oh, that I've had tied to actually a really good time that I had with that person. So I call it the gift and crappy wrapping paper because, at face value, when we first see it, we don't know what to think we have the surge of emotions going on and they kind of block us from seeing the gifts, the lessons and the blessings.
Speaker 2:Um, but later on we see it. So I always say that these things happen with purpose and they're happening for you. They're not happening to you, they're happening for you and they'll make you a better person on your path. So it's good if you see things in that light and can get there. You know, no matter what stage of grief you're in, you can always choose to see that, Even if it's a little bit or a lot, it just depends on the person.
Speaker 2:but that will give you that space, by the way, to actually put purpose and meaning behind your healing for you, not for other people, but for you, and it will strengthen you on your journey. It's a beautiful process to watch.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean the loss of your son. What was your son's name? Uh, my son's name is Caden. Caden, it's an awesome name. I like that. Um, I. I would assume that at first, his loss probably caused a lot of anger and a lot of um, probably, I would assume it probably even probably created some issues with between you and your wife. How did you, how did you come to terms with that and and find figure out that that was a gift, rather than than being salty over it for lack of better terms?
Speaker 2:So you know I'll be open and candid with you guys, cause that's just kind of the coach that I am. Um, there was a time when I can't, when I was home after that happened and I was I had a wood shop at that time, by the way and um, I had days where I was just I was flat out angry about it, I was lost and I was very scared, very unsure.
Speaker 1:Um there, was a day.
Speaker 2:I grabbed a random piece of wood. I lived out in the woods, by the way, in the middle of New Hampshire, um, but long story short, I grabbed a piece of wood. I lived out in the woods, by the way, in the middle of New Hampshire, but long story short, I grabbed a piece of wood and just beat my driveway to death. One time. For minutes, I mean, I just I couldn't get it out of me other than beating this piece of wood and where it finally broke for me too, by the way, my moment just being in full transparency.
Speaker 2:I was building a wooden box for his ashes one day in my shop and the wood wasn't cooperating, let's put it that way um, and I threw it on the ground. I was just, I was crying, I was upset, I just was saying, like, why did this have to happen? Anyway, I stepped on the box and busted my foot and I ended up in the hospital in the boot, uh, for six weeks. And that's when it all. And you know, I share this for a reason, not for the anger side of it, but I share this because that was the release that needed to come out.
Speaker 1:That was all the, all the pent-up, pent-up energy just going all that sympathetic energy's got to get out of there somehow, right?
Speaker 2:yeah and that was the day, by the way, after I busted my foot, came back from the hospital and fun stuff, I finally said, okay, I've made peace with this. It happened. I not happy about it, I'm not going to be happy about in the future. You know, I still. I still, to this day, I go into the store and see people with their kids. It's really hard for me If I hear Christmas tunes in the store. It's really hard for me. You know, sometimes I have to leave the store because of it.
Speaker 2:But I learned that day, in that moment I said this anger that I have right now is just raw love and raw grief for my kid. That's where it's coming from. And and I have to learn in those moments that when I feel this way, I need to allow myself space to cry and feel these things and say you're really sad and upset. He's not here today. You're upset about that and that's okay. If you got to walk out of the store because something triggered you, that's okay. That's part of your process, it's part of your healing.
Speaker 1:Everybody heals differently, right.
Speaker 2:Everybody heals different. I've run into people in my coaching business, by the way, that had a miscarriage a year and a half, two years ago, just kind of like when I lost my kid and they're all angry about something that happened today, in this moment, and it happened to be near the day that that all happened years ago. And I say there's something that happened bigger, that's going on, some deeper feeling you might have that you might not be expressing or want to express or share during this coaching session, that maybe you need to give yourself attention to. And I had one of my coaching clients tell me you know, chris, I had a miscarriage a couple of years ago and it really hurt me. And I said, well, tell me about that. And they said, well, you know now that we're talking about it.
Speaker 2:It actually happened this week, in February, two years ago. And I told my client, I said, girl, you need to heal right now. You need to give yourself space to feel that Like, let's forget about, you know, whatever happened with Joe Blow this week. You're actually feeling this loss that you had and I don't think somebody gave you the space to talk about that, let alone feel it. And I said I can tell that you've got those emotions and, as your coach, I want to be here to give you that space to open up and talk about these things.
Speaker 2:And my my client cried on the phone for 10 minutes about it and I gave her that space to feel and and she felt a massive like I said about smashing that box with my foot she got that same release of energy from it and she said she said thank you for giving me that space to feel that I've never actually given myself that opportunity to feel that loss because of everything else that was going on in that moment with that loss.
Speaker 2:And she said I actually feel calmer now but I also feel at peace because I was able to address it. And so that's the kind of impact I look for when I'm a coach is to give people that space Because, like I said, a lot of us move very fast in life today and it's one of these move on with things and we've got a lot of stuff in life to do. But at the end of the day, we're humans. All of us are. It doesn't matter who you are. We're all humans. We all have emotion, we all have feelings and we have to take time to deal with those things, and when I say deal with, it's actually very healing for you to feel those things.
Speaker 1:Well, it sounds like you've definitely lived that, that mantra of not moving on but moving forward. Um, you've gotten some certifications in coaching. Could you talk to a little, to us a little bit, about your certifications and what you're?
Speaker 2:working on now? Certainly Um. So my right now I've got a master life coach certification that covers a lot of things, um, aspects of life like happiness coaching, goal coaching. Um, I have a professional life coach certification. Um, right now, what I'm working on is a certification for a topic called NLP, which is neuro linguistic programming, and it's a process in your brain to help you work through negative emotions, hard emotions, grief and loss. It's for lack of a better term trapped up here. I've been, I've been there, by the way, with that, and so something for me that I always look for in my coaching practice is that I'm never always going to know answers. I'm never going to know everything. It's just too much stuff to figure out. But what?
Speaker 2:I always look for is what can I add value for to my clients so that I can better serve them? And the biggest mantra in my business is that I want to leave people better than I found them, and so if you come to me with grief or trauma, you're going to find out that I want to be in that space for a minute. I want you to feel those things. I want to help you work through them, and so, by adding a neuro-linguistic program into my repertoire of tools, it's going to better allow me to serve people from different areas of grief and loss and trauma and even self-acceptance, and so that's one of them that I'm working on right now, and I just am always looking for new certifications, because the more knowledge I have, the more I can pass on to other people, and if I can leave you better than I found you, I'm happy for you. I'm really happy for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome. No-transcript.
Speaker 2:It does. I always laugh, because I worked in the mortgage business for eight years and I can tell that in the mortgage business you always have to take clock hour classes every single year, and I was licensed in 23 states to do business, and so I had roughly about 45, 50 hours of training every single year, single year. And so coaching for me is the same thing. You know you can. There's people out there that get one certification and stay there. There's other people that say this was just a stepping stone.
Speaker 2:With this certification, what's the next thing I can do to better serve my clients? And I think if you stay in that space of continual learning, not only will I grow from it, my clients will get better from it, they'll grow and learn. And you know the the nice part too about coaching and another bigger reason I got into it and I'm helping people with grief and loss is because you're going to have a different story than me and your. Your path is going to be different than mine, and so I learn a lot from my clients. Believe it or not, I learned from them, and it's. It's a beautiful thing in a coaching call when I when I'm kind of like leading the call for a minute, but then they step up and share something. I go, wow, I actually never thought about that. Or wow, that's actually a really cool story and I hope I can share that with other people.
Speaker 1:Some of the most, some of the most powerful healing I've ever had has been while coaching someone else.
Speaker 2:I love that. That's what coaching should be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Can you. We during our pre-talk before recording, we talked a little bit about faith. Could you talk a little bit about how faith has kind of steered your direction here?
Speaker 2:Definitely so I will share upfront. I would go to church on Christmas and Easter. Growing up, my family wasn't up front. I would go to church on Christmas and Easter. Growing up, my family wasn't super religious, if you will, in the sense of going to church regularly. When I moved back to New Hampshire I started dabbling in faith a little bit more. I started saying, okay, why don't I open my horizons up and explore what faith is? Because it never really was there much for me growing up and I always had one of these weird things like I wanted, like proof of it. I was one of those people that wanted proof that God exists and, and most of my friends would say, god's always with you. God always talks to you. What are you? What are you talking about?
Speaker 2:And one and one of my friends was a pastor of the church you know down the town from where I was at, so I would always talk to him about religion and we had great conversations, and so one of the funniest things I'll share, where my faith got drawn is that I was asking God for a sign. It was openly in the air. I'd walk down my driveway in the woods and I would just ask God, give me a sign.
Speaker 2:So in the middle of 2020 in April, right in the middle of COVID, and everything was going crazy. We had this massive windstorm like 40, 50 mile an hour winds, the power went out, the whole thing and so, anyway, I'm cleaning up this huge mess and I go down at the end of my driveway and there's a cross in the trees, like a perfect 90-degree cross you'd see in church and I look up in the trees just dumbfounded and in shock because I'm going. What's actually happening right now? I mean, I asked for a sign, but this is a little too good to be true and anyway, I can.
Speaker 2:I never really have the right way to explain it, but I would talk to God all the time at the end of my driveway. I'd go down there and I would say thank you for all the good things that would happen. And if I was having struggles with things, I would go down there and talk to God and I would say you know, I'm really struggling with this right now. Or when I lost my son, I went down there and yelled at the cross. I yelled at God.
Speaker 2:I was mad, I was angry and something that I found out in my faith experience, you know, for me personally, I found out God is there and he's been there by my side the whole time. I just have never opened my mind enough to allow him space to come in as my faith journey. And so when I sold my house from New Hampshire, something didn't feel right with the first realtor. I can't explain it, but it was not looking like a very good situation. And all of a sudden, this realtor that was local, she lived not even 10 minutes from my house. Somehow we found her locally through something, and she came by the house and it was a whole different feel and vibe.
Speaker 2:And the thing that she said to me that stood out the most was, as she said, she looked at our Facebook profiles and looked at our house and tried to learn about us before she met us. And she said, after we told her we lost our son. She said I had a feeling I was supposed to be here to help you guys. I don't really know why, but I was supposed to be here to help you with us. And she was a very faith person. She goes to church really regularly, like every Sunday kind of thing, and so when I look at what really bad thing was about to happen with selling my house and then it just mystically happened to work out better, we ended up ended up finding buyers that um loved our house for the purpose of what it was. They love the nature of the animals and everything. Um, she herself got ended up getting us way more for the house and we were going to the first realtor.
Speaker 2:All these things just started weirdly falling in line without any kind of interaction, um, and so I kept talking to God through that and I said what are you trying to tell me right now? What do I need to be mindful of or aware of, and what's going to happen with things. And it was always this comforting reassurance from him when I talked to him at the cross, and it was always. Things are going to be a little murky right now. They're going to be a little uncertain, and you're going to move again.
Speaker 2:You're going to start over again and you're actually going to go after your coaching business. You're going to actually build a new life. You're going to get the things that you want in life and I'm going to give that to you. But it's going to be on this journey and you've got to trust me. And so I told God I trust you on my path. I'm not going to get in the way anymore. I'm going to let things come to me versus pushing them. And ever since I've given my faith to God, I will say that not everything's peaches and rainbows. I'll tell you, guys, that sometimes God throws us a challenge and you can choose to see it as negative.
Speaker 2:You can also choose to say this is a test and God's testing you to make sure that you're ready for the next thing. And I can say through my experiences, that's what faith has done for me.
Speaker 1:I read a book once. I can't think of the title of it off the top of my head, but there was a statement in there that said something to the effect of never regret anything that's happened to you in your life, because it created the person that you are today. So even the traumas that we go through, they serve a purpose in our lives. They really do yeah. So are you primarily coaching now or are you still working in the woodworking space?
Speaker 2:I'm primarily coaching right now. I'm in the business. I'm in the stage right now of building my coaching practice. I've been working with people to build up some reviews and get them results. So I'm in that phase of things of coaching some people for free right now, just to build up my testimonials. And my biggest thing is I'm just looking for people to work with right now and to have meaningful conversations and I just want to help people.
Speaker 2:I don't know how to explain it, but I'm not a money-driven kind of person. I care more about helping people because I was in this place for the last two and a half three years that I just wasn't able to find a job because my mortgage industry got decimated with stuff. That's happened and I'll be fair with you every time. Even in mortgages, the biggest thing I learned was doing mortgages was about 5% of what I did. What I really did as a loan officer was I actually helped people with life problems and they would come to me with everything from divorce to my husband cheated on me, to we don't have money for this or we're moving across country or, um. You know, I've worked with people that were special forces that couldn't tell me where they were going and I had five kids that got to relocate across the country.
Speaker 2:I've dealt with a lot of things to help people through difficult situations, and so, like I said, I care more about leaving people better than I found them, and that's really my mission and my purpose in life, and that's what God showed me through a lot of my traumas. He said I'm the kind of guy who's here to help people, and helping people in that capacity is the true beauty and the true blessing of life, and so I'm purposely living out that passion right now and I I've never been happier. It's, it's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1:That's an awesome segue. And asking you if people are interested in working with you how are they?
Speaker 2:how would they get ahold of you? So if you guys are interested in working with me, I give a free one hour long discovery call for you guys to connect with me.
Speaker 2:You can find me on Instagram and you guys can find me on Facebook. You can also find me at acceptancecoachcom. You guys can reach out and book a call with me.
Speaker 2:My biggest thing that I'll share with you guys of why I do a free call up front is I want you to feel free to ask me any questions you have about coaching. I want you to be able to feel comfortable enough to get to know me and make sure it's the right fit to work together, and I want you to be able to share what's going on in your life right now. I want you to feel free to say I'm not happy with this, or actually, things are going really well with this. I'm just trying to get to the next step and don't know how, and I need some help, and and so I want to open up that space for a free call for you to make sure that we're a good fit to work together and your coaching is going to look the way you want it to look, and to be able to create that path for you to get the results you're looking for.
Speaker 1:Awesome, and I'll share a link to your website in the description and tag you on Facebook when I post this on Facebook for the link for the podcast, so people can get all of you that way. Chris, it's been a pleasure to talk to you, man. You got a lot going on.
Speaker 2:I'm excited to see what you do next. Yeah, thank you, russ. I appreciate having the opportunity to connect with you today. I'm looking forward to future collaborations with you Awesome.
Speaker 1:Hey, if you don't mind, I like to end all of my episodes with a quick exercise for people to to of my episodes with a quick exercise for people to help ground themselves. This is a different topic than we normally cover. You know, we cover a lot of betrayal trauma, a lot of childhood trauma, narcissistic abuse, those sorts of things. Grief trauma is not something we've really touched on, so I would imagine there's probably some people out there listening that could be triggered. So if you don't mind working with me, man, I'd love to take them through an exercise that can kind of help them ground and get themselves de-triggered. Yeah, let's do that. Okay, awesome. So this is a somatic exercise. You guys can all do this with me. If you just kind of cross your arms across your chest onto your shoulders and just tap back and forth at whatever speed you feel like is comfortable, forth, at whatever speed you feel like is comfortable, and then just glance around the room and pick out three things that are white For me it's my ring light, the light switch and my keyboard and while you're doing that, start focusing your attention on your breath. And while you're doing that, start focusing your attention on your breath. How long is your in-breath? How long is your out-breath? Are you feeling anything in your stomach or chest? Once you identify whatever feeling you might be feeling in your stomach or chest it could be a tightness in your chest, it could be a drop in blood pressure, it could be a tightness or twisting in your stomach Just focus on it and then, with about 20% of your attention, change your pattern of breath. Breathe in for five seconds, hold it for two, breathe out for six to eight seconds and just feel your seat, feel your feet on the floor, feel the temperature of the air. When we're present, we're connected. When we're connected, we're safe. Chris, thanks so much for joining me, man, it's been a blessing to have you on. Hey, thank you so much, russ. All right, we'll talk soon, thank you. So I hope you guys enjoyed that interview as much as I enjoyed doing it. Uh, chris is a great guy. He's got a heck of a story man and and you know, we don't talk a lot about grief trauma on this channel. We talk a lot about childhood trauma and relationship trauma, narcissistic abuse, those types of things, but it's very rare. I don't think we've ever spoken about grief trauma so and it's a real thing. I mean, people can be traumatized to the nth degree by the death of a loved one, even a loved one who's very old. So you know, it goes back to that whole trauma backpack, right, you never know how much trauma someone is carrying or what type of trauma someone's carrying or how it's going to affect them. So that was a great interview carrying or how it's going to affect them. So that was a great interview.
Speaker 1:If you guys are interested in checking out Chris, chris can be found at acceptancecoachcom. Thanks again for coming and checking us out. If you are a new listener, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you guys find a place here that's safe, that you can explore these things. And if you are a regular listener, thank you again for coming back once again to listen to me of all people. So thanks again, guys. We'll talk to you next week.