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Hi, before I get into today's episode, I need to let you know that this is a trigger warning. For those of you who might feel uncomfortable with the talk of suicide, or with me telling you about my child's death, I do not talk in this episode with details about how he died specifically. But if this is something that makes you uncomfortable, maybe this isn't a good episode for you to listen to. Also, if you are feeling depressed or suicidal, please reach out there is help. There is a National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in the United States 1-800-273-8255. And also, you can always call 911.+

But I encourage you that you are not alone, you are valuable, you are here for a purpose. And there are so many people who are willing to listen and help you get the help you need. I wish as a parent who've lost as lost a child to suicide that we had been given that chance with our son. And we weren't given that chance. He never reached out to anybody, even to let them know that he was feeling depressed or he was thinking about suicide. And so it's important to me as that parent, that I spread that message to you if you are somebody who needs that help. Alright, so let's get into today's episode. Welcome to beautifully bloomed, the podcast where we explore how to break you out of the box of rules and beliefs that are holding you back from the life you are meant to live. I'm your host, Rebecca Tervo. Join me as I share mindset tools, coaching conversations and Human Design to help you uncover your unique gifts and create the life relationships in business you desire.

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Okay, so this is different today. I'm thankful that you're here listening, I hope that you get something from this. But what I know over the years is, as I've shared my story that so many people have been touched by it. And so because I'm on a new platform, a new podcast, I felt it was relevant here to provide some background to why I am now doing the kind of work that I do. And a big huge part of that is in the foundation of the suicide of our son, our 17 year old son. So today is as you're listening to this, it's the ninth anniversary of Trevor's suicide, he died on January 29, of 2012. It was totally unexpected. And every year on the anniversary of his death, and on his birthday, I do something to honor him just for my own personal and sometimes as a family we do also but for my own personal healing journey, I like to usually I've been writing blog posts and Facebook posts in the past.

And I'll probably put something on Facebook about this too. But on this new platform, I thought it would be really nice to leave a voice remembrance, I guess. So I know that sharing is healing and it helps others. And it definitely has helped me over the years to share my story. And every year, I can look back at the year and say, Wow, I've come so far. And I've come really far now it feels like some days It feels like a lifetime ago. And other days, it doesn't feel that long at all that Trevor died.

But stories are really powerful, I think to share to help others see where their own healing is possible. So I want to talk about Trevor's backstory briefly and tell you just a little bit about who he was, if you've ever had the experience of losing someone to suicide for one thing, I am so sorry, I never expected that I would be the person to be talking about this kind of topic. I never thought that I would be someone who would actually be in public talking about suicide, it just seemed like something that only happens in movies or books or TV shows. It's not something that actually happens to people like me, or families like us. And I think there's a misconception of who it is that dies by suicide.

I know before Trevor died. My thought was, well, people who die by suicide, they either like were abused as a child or they went through some huge traumatic experience or they're having like a lot of drug problems, or these things that didn't seem to apply to our family. And so I want to say that when Trevor died, it was a shock to us. It was a shock to our family and our whole community because he didn't fit those things. We didn't know of any Depression, he had not had a history of depression that we knew of.

He was involved in school activities, he had friends, he was seemed like a happy kid. And underneath the surface, there was something there that we weren't seeing. But we had no idea was just a total shock. There were no warning signs, I know what I thought were warning signs, which I didn't even know to pay attention for anyways, because I didn't think I was totally out of the loop on this, that any of my kids would be somebody who might die of suicide. Some of the things I thought were warning signs were like, they sleep too much, or they don't sleep enough, or they change friends suddenly, or they start partying all of a sudden, or they start doing drugs, suddenly, when they've never done them before, or their schoolwork drops off. None of these were signs that we saw. In fact, Trevor was seemingly very normal. He was 17 years old. He was a junior in high school, he had above normal intelligence, I would say be above average.

If I'm thinking of some of the signs of that, you know, in sixth grade, he was at the 12th grade leaving reading level, like he was really a smart kid. And we always thought, whoa, we were so excited and interested to see what he was going to do with his life after high school because he was so intelligent. He was really musically talented. He played many different instruments, including the piano and the guitar. And I forget what those little things are called. But he was really into the Zelda he played the Zelda songs.

He was artistically talented, very much of a writer and poet. So he was very creative. So when we found him, he had done all his work. All his schoolwork was caught up, it was in his book bag and ready to go. He was always very curious, who's curious about a lot of things. He jumped from wanting to telescope and he wanted a microscope, you know, he was just a very curious kid, he wanted always to know how things worked. He had a very dry sense of humor, which is really was really funny, like in second grade. And when he was using these huge words, I was like, where do you know these huge words from, I mean, he was just a voracious reader, he had just an appetite for knowledge. And he was the second in line of our four kids.

So when Trevor died, our son was 19, Trevor was 17, Kendra was 13. And Annika was eight when Trevor died, it made such an a huge impact in our home life. As we were all still all of our kids were living at home at the time. That's just a little bit about Trevor. And it was so unexpected to find him dead on a Sunday morning, 2012. And it rocked our world, it's hard to explain unless you've been through something similar, where one day, the world, you know, everything seems normal, and the next day your your child is dead, he can't hardly fathom that something like this could happen to you in your life. And also, since there were five of us living in the same house now, and we were all grieving, and we were all grieving differently. It was like this whole new world to come into. And I didn't really know as a mom, what to do. I couldn't even control my own emotions. I couldn't figure out how I was going to get anybody through this when I couldn't even figure out how to get myself through it. So you know what happened after that? Of course, there was this big search for why

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would this seemingly normal kid do this? We couldn't figure it out. And you know, my husband, of course, I think dads in general want to know things. They want to protect people. They want to figure out why things happen. He's an engineer. So he went on this whole journey of trying to figure it out. Like this was like this puzzle to solve. Really, at the end of the day, I don't feel like we have any great answers for what happened or why it happened. I feel like his friends were just as shocked. None of them had any idea what happened. They were just as shocked as we were and the community and the school. It was just a community thing. We did not have any clue. He did leave a note. But I have to say, I am grateful. I'm so grateful. For that note, I'm grateful that he left us a note that he had some words to tell us. I can't tell you though, that they offered all of the answers that we would, we would have wanted.

And so I remember having dreams with him in them and I used to keep a dream journal. I haven't had a dream now with Trevor for a long time. And every time I had a dream, I would get up and I would write it down. I just I liked to track them. And I still have that journal so I can go back and look at it. But it was interesting that he never talked to me in the dreams. He didn't ever talk to me. And I always wished he would talk to me. I wanted to like ask him Why, but I never asked him in the dream either.

So I guess, in some ways, it wasn't meant for me to have that conversation with him even in a dream. But I have heard of parents who've been able to have conversations with their children, who the children who have passed on, I've heard that they've been able to have these conversations, but I never was able to my husband never even had a dream. What's interesting about that kind of stuff, the dreams and you know, it was just part of this, this whole question of why, why did this happen? How can we prevent it from happening to our other children? I went through quite a lot of stress and anxiety over Oh, if we didn't catch it, like what did we miss? You know, I went through so much we we combed our life both both Rob and I, we comb through life, like, what did we miss?

Where did we fail? As parents? Of course, you feel like this huge failure, like, isn't it our job to like God has given us these children and isn't it our job to protect them and raise them and, and get them to adulthood. And I felt like if I got them to adulthood, and then they were members of society that could give their gifts to society, and they could be a part of this community. And I felt like such a failure. And that was really difficult, because I always thought that there was this list of things in life, if you do this, this, this and this, then you get this result.

It was like an equation, A plus B plus C plus D plus E equals whatever. I always thought that that was how life was. And when this happened, it totally turned that all the beliefs I ever had about things on its head. I was like, Okay, wait, I believe this. And I thought that and I did that. And then this other thing happened anyways. So now what like it totally. It's almost like you step into, like, through this door into a whole new portal. You know, I really believe now that not every answer, I will not know the answers of everything, until I leave this earth. I really, truly believe that. And I came to the conclusion, and I accepted that a bit quicker than my husband, and we're on different grieving paths.

That was another thing I learned that, you know, between the two of us, you know, we we both had our ups and downs. And it was amazing to see that when I was low, he was higher, when he was low. I was hired it was, that was the only way that I think that we, as a couple, were able to support each other, I often say that there was no support for each other, there just wasn't it. You know, I've heard other moms say that, oh, and without my husband, he was so supportive. I have to be honest here that my husband, I felt was struggling with this, in some ways, way beyond something I could understand. And so I felt like for so long, I was just so sad about it. And he was really angry, I could not understand the anger, he couldn't understand why I wasn't so angry. There was a lot of things that happened in our marriage that we just couldn't figure out like, it was hard enough to figure out our own individual grief without trying to help the other one. So what I would say is, it was very important, and both of us did get our own therapists, we did not go to marriage therapy, we went to our own therapist for grief.

And now I think that, at least at that beginning part was really important to get us through some of those initial hurdles. And they feel therapy and counseling is so super important. super important. I am a life coach. And I want to tell you that even though I did coach, a browned grief coaching and therapy aren't the same thing. And a lot of my clients had therapists before they sought coaching. So the search for why you know that why question kept us stuck for a long time. We were all dealing grieving differently. myself.

I ping pong between keeping really busy with family and life stuff and just trying to pretend like, you know, I'm happy and I mean, I wasn't pretending I'm happy. But I was trying to like show people that I can do this like I am I am making progress. You know, people want to hear that when they ask you how you are. They want you to I think that's what they want to hear like, Oh good. She's feeling better. Oh, good. She's on the path. Right? So I really might the people pleaser in me, man. She came out major sometimes during that time. And the other thing though, is I ping pong between that. And between literally just being apathetic and sinking into a chair. I remember my husband telling this story. I was at a speaking event at our local library and I was speaking about my book to different groups of people. And my husband came to this one talk I gave and he told the story of he remembers me just sitting with my big, fluffy purple robe.

In the Lazy Boy, this I remember we had this Huge green Lazy Boy. And I would just sink in there with my big fluffy purple robe and a blanket, and my computer and I would literally just watch movies TV, he said, and she had the big bag of m&ms. So I in some respects, I was trying and after became a life coach, I would call this buffering, it's like buffering away your feelings, like you just don't want to deal with them. You don't want to think about it. Think about what I've learned about healing, you eventually just have to visit all that stuff in your head, and you have to let out the emotion you cannot stuff it down. But I really did try to stuff it down. I spent several years doing that. And there was a turning point that came for me. So the thought had something to do with no one's going to come save me. Like, I felt like I was maybe waiting for something to come save me. You know, I don't know that.

I felt like my, maybe my husband would figure it out. Or, you know, it was apparent to me that he was on his own journey. How can you save me? I mean, we were in such a place that we actually thought that we might have to separate and get divorced. And we heard, I don't know, you know, lately, what are the real statistics? I don't know, I heard both sides of the story. But some people are like, Oh, it's just so common for parents to divorce after they lose a child. I also heard the other side where, you know, some people become even closer. So I didn't feel like becoming closer was what happened for us, at least in those first years. I feel like we are on such a different journey, where each, you know, in a different place. And I just, you know, sometimes you just want to run away from the pain. I think that was what it was. For me. I don't know what it was for Rob. But for me, it was like I wanted to run away from the pain.

And I sometimes your brain wants to think that leaving the marriage would be running away from the pain, what I what I now know. And it's like, wherever you go, your brain, your thoughts are still there, right? And your thoughts and your feelings and everything. You're You're still there, you can't run away from it like you can't outrun it. And so at one point, I know we talked about it separating and we talked about divorce. This did bring up a question for me this healing through this grief was like, do I want to commit to this marriage? Or do I want to use this as a reason to leave and and at the time, I was like, I don't need another problem stacked on top of all these problems. Because when we were talking about separation and divorce, our youngest daughter would have now been maybe 10. You know, we still would have had a 10 and a 10 and 15 year old at home. And it was like an actually our 21 year old was still living at home. So it didn't seem to me like what kind of problems would that solve? It would probably create more problems, which was the only logical thing I think for me, that kept me committed.

And no, I don't think this is a good idea. I think we need to do some of our work on ourselves and figure out how to heal some of this grief, before we add on more issues, like getting a divorce. I don't feel like that's going to solve our issues. So I mean, I am really grateful for that. I'm grateful for my thoughts about that. that kept me committed because I feel like our family needed us to stay together. Our kids needed us to stay together. I remember one thing I was really upset about when my mom told me, she said, I can't solve your problems. I can't remember the exact wording. But the basis of it was she couldn't solve my problems. I needed to walk through them myself. And at the time, I was really angry about that.

And right now I can see what she meant. Like Looking back, I can see what she meant at the time. It just felt like yeah, there's nobody here. Like I felt like the whole like there's nobody to help. I'm on my own journey. I can't even ask for help. Like it was just a weird and I did ask for help then right? I had therapy. But I remember the thought that no one's coming to save me. And it was really actually built a fire within me. It started this flame of I am going to figure this out. That's where that flame that thought I am going to figure this out. really brought me to a place where I got so inspired to just go out I didn't care what it took. I was gonna do something. So I had already been through therapy. I had already been in a grief support group I went to three compassionate friends conferences. The first one I went to, I went to by myself and I just was looking for something like I said I needed something I needed to talk to other people who had lost children to suicide. I just couldn't find people to talk to. I was really frustrated with that, that I could not find people to talk to. So I went there for that reason.

And that was so helpful to me because when I got in a room with just other parents who had lost children, I was so surprised that some of them were parents of doctors, some of them were parents of med students. If Their children died by suicide. like, Okay, so now I was thinking, Okay, there, Trevor was not as abnormal or weird as I might have thought, right? Because if you know doctors or med students are dying by suicide, then it's not like, like, I thought there was some kind of childhood depression problem we didn't see, I think it gave me some peace thinking, Okay, I really thought there was something so screwed up with him as a human being that I totally missed it. Whereas now I'm seeing that he was really smart and perfectionistic.

And I think I might have forgot that part. He's very perfectionistic. And I think he put a lot of pressure on himself, to do things properly. And that's actually one of the signs, sharing my story, over and over again, really has helped me in my healing journey. I know that my story is important in my own journey. So I feel like I will constantly still be sharing it in different ways. But I don't feel the need to go out and find a grief conference anymore. I don't feel the need to speak to that certain audience about it, I want to say is my girls, like, by this time, like, when I have this thought they were it was probably two to three years, and I wish I could remember the exact date, you know, they were now 15 and 10.

And I was thinking to myself, would I want my daughters to leave, you know, leave home and go off on their own and just remember me as being just depressed the whole time. You know, they were they were young, they were at a stage in their life, where so much was happening for them. And I just, that was one other thing. I was like, you know what I need to figure out a way to show my daughters that we can live through this, that we can have a happy life, that we can still have happiness and joy and fun. And we can still go on family vacations and have fun. Like I really wanted them to see that there's a way to live beyond the grief of a tragedy that there's a way to remember, Trevor, but remember the happiness and yes, have some sadness about it, for sure. We missed him so dearly. But I wanted them to, you know, I wanted them to be able to have a life and not worry about me the whole time, being sad and depressed and lonely and all the things so I think that was my turning point. But really now what happened is I went with an intention of investing my resources, my time and my money into actually figuring out how to actually find happiness again. And so I found a tapping the first coach I hired was actually a tapping coach. And I don't know if you know what that is. That's the EFT thing, you know.

And on the podcast, you can't see me but you know, tapping on your face, there's points on your face. Actually, that started like lifting anger. It just started releasing these layers of anger, which I had no idea that I had buried so deep, so not only from Trevor's death, but before Trevor's death. It was like things that I hadn't dealt with from the past. It was very fascinating how I started releasing stuff like that. I found so I found it, the tapping coach, then I found a podcast, which was life changing, called the Life Coach School podcast. If you haven't heard of it, go check it out. Amazing. Brooke Castillo is my mentor and coach who I was certified through her school, but I binge listened to it, starting with episode one.

And I learned so many tools about managing my mind and managing myself so that I can be in relationship better with other people. I just learned so much. And I remember we were on a trip in Tennessee. We love traveling, by the way, we've taken our kids I'm so grateful that we took traveled to so many places during his life, like he got to see so many things got to experience a lot of things with us. And I'm just so grateful. So I remember that we were on a trip and I think we were on. I don't remember if we were on our way to probably are on our way to Florida or somewhere. Anyways, we were stopped at a rest area. And I remember I had just listened to this part of the Life Coach School podcast, which talked about relationships, and it was talking about marriage. And the one thing that really struck me, as she said that we have a manual. And our manual is about how we believe or we expect other people to behave. That was one of the turning points for me and looking at our marriage differently. Now this was before I actually went and hired Brooke and her program or any of that I just was like, like so binge listening to the podcast.

But I remember that was so impactful, because we had been having right not only I mean, Trevor had died and we were having these issues in their marriage. And so it wasn't just a personal but it was a personal thing. It was about oh I have these expectations of how he's supposed to be and this is why I feel unfulfilled sometimes is because Because I expect something I remembered, like that moment was very powerful for me when I was like, wow. And I thought, whoa, I really now wanted to join the Life Coach School self coaching Scholars Program. I joined that first. So I joined the coaching program, I started working on myself, I started seeing how amazing these tools were. And that's when I decided I want to be a life coach, I want to help other people.

So at the time, I was working at the university, I've talked about this before, I am a I was a CPA, I could still call myself a CPA, but I'm not certified and licensed. I'm not licensed. Let's say I'm not licensed right now. But I was working at the university funding, I'd had what you'd say many people would want that job. Like that was a really good job. It was, you know, provided free education for my kids. For one thing, I worked at a university that provided free education. So it was just a really great job to be in for the benefits.

I was not happy there. I when I first started, it was six months before Trevor died. And I think part of the issue became that my whole time there was wrapped around me grieving the death of my son. I wonder what would have happened if Trevor hadn't have died? Like I you know, you always go back and you wonder why things happen the way they do. I guess they're supposed to happen. I have just decided things happen the way they do because they happened. So I you know, looking back, it's not helpful to look back and think, well, if he had to die, maybe to stay there. But you know, our brain does go there. Sometimes. I think that I probably would have found my place there maybe if Trevor hadn't have died. But the thing fact is Trevor did die.

So that colored my whole journey there. And I was so stressed out with that job. I was it was very, I felt like it was demanding. And I was stressed and I just never felt like I hit my stride. I felt like I was always wanting things to be different or better, or there was something that I wasn't getting there. I finally decided to leave that and become a certified life coach. That was really hard decision. But I after I left there, I wrote my best selling book about my journey through grief. And it just like really showed me that I once I got that book published, I was like, Oh my gosh, I could actually help women in this space. I felt like there was so much I could pass on. And maybe that was my role at the time. That's what kicked off my coaching career.

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I left my university job, everybody thought I was crazy. My husband wasn't happy about it. But he had come to the point where he saw how miserable I was really. And I like I said, I think a lot of that misery was from unhealed grief to I wasn't fully healing. I wasn't fully healed. I I don't know, are we ever fully healed? That's a question to ask. But anyways, I felt like I was still struggling with so much. And I just decided I needed to leave that make space for something and from our healing. And I knew I stayed there for at least two years too long. I this just what I felt like I stayed there too long. And you know, even now, though, as a life coach and running my own business, there's a lot of ups and downs, I love creating this, and they're still my emotions to deal with. So, you know, I don't think I think we think that there's this, there's this paradise over there, right? There's this paradise if we would just, you know, go there.

And what I've learned is like life is a bunch of transitions that you have to go through to get to the next thing, which doesn't mean it's easy at the next thing. It's just different issues. It's different problems. 2020 was a huge evolution for me. And I stopped doing grief coaching work. So my last grief coaching client actually was in March, we ended our coaching, that was perfectly about grief. Now I coach still, but it's not focused on grief anymore. And it was such an evolution for me. And I felt this shift coming and I turned 50 in 2020.

And I felt the shift coming of what do I truly want to do now that I have experienced coaching is something I thought that's my career after my, my accounting business. After my accounting, I did have an accounting business at one time. After my accounting work and everything was through. I felt like this was the next shift. I really wanted to do coaching and mentoring. But yet the grief coaching wasn't it anymore. And I think what happened is I had come to a place where I felt so removed from the people who were coming to me. It was interesting. It was like, I don't I don't want to how can I say this? I don't want to identify with that place anymore. I don't want to It's not that I can't coach grief. That's not I can hold space. for it, all the things, it's just that I felt I wanted to focus more on creating life rather than healing from grief. Which I know healing from grief is part of creating life.

But I really wanted people to be at a certain place of wanting to create things, wanting one of my right now one of my clients is an author, and I love that kind of stuff. So that's the kind of stuff I'm happy about, like helping people create things, helping people create their life, helping people live into the life, they were here to live, not focusing on, okay, here's the tools for grief. And let's continue to work through those. I think that was super helpful for me to in getting to a different level in my grief and getting in my healing, I should say, in my healing work, I felt like I got to this level where I just wanted to focus on life instead of grief. And so it's just, I think everything we go through is exactly the right reason to set us up for where we are today. And so I'm so excited that what I do now, everything that I've learned everything I've grown through everything I've gone through, it leads me to here to today.

And I know that the decisions I've made the reason I made them, I know that it's helpful to this new business, it's helpful for me to help others to make decisions to clarify what they want to do, too. And that's the kind of work I want to do now, right. That's what I'm doing. Now, I have so many fun ideas and plans to bring to bring together several things. And tools to help female coaches that are kind of like me to really work through things like people pleasing rule following any kind of grief, obviously, but like, these blocks that we have, that really keep us from being who we want to be and having the relationships and the life and the business that we want. And one of the tools that has really changed my life in 2020. And I found it at the end of 2019 was human design. So I'm bringing Human Design together with life coaching tools, as well as mindset like meditation and visualizations. I'm bringing these all together to help women to integrate into them real their real selves,

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cuz I feel like Trevor's death taught me so much about who I am. His death taught me so much about my life. And I don't know that I would have really sunk into and taken a better look at my life. If it hadn't been for that. Like, it is not good. I missed that kid, I we just put away the stockings last week, and we came his stocking every year, it just, he's just forever a part of me and our youngest daughter is 17 now, and that is so weird to think that he was 17 when he died. I just it's just it's unfathomable to me.

But I have to say that I took that experience. And I used it as an opportunity to really dig into Well, okay, now that I recognize that life can change at any moment, what what do I really want to be doing in this moment, in this time between moments? What do I want to be doing, regardless of what is happening? And what I was doing wasn't what I wanted to be doing? What I'm doing now is really following my I've heard it, say follow your bliss, or do what makes you happy? Yes, that's I really, truly believe that I want to enjoy my work. Because I love working. I want to enjoy my work, though. And so I'm creating from that place. Now I'm creating from that place of, hey, I've been through this. And I know you've been through things. And you know, what can we still create, though, for where we're at. I love to help people get through the stuff that I've been through that people pleasing rule following strict religion, the thoughts that, you know, we're stuck in a certain way, like all of that stuff, it doesn't help us get what we want. So that's kind of where my coaching practice is heading now.

And I love the fact that I'm going to be able to talk about that kind of stuff on this podcast. So watch for future episodes of that I love having conversations with other coaches or people who've made transitions in their lives. If you know of anybody who would be a good story for that. Let me know I think that this My story is the kind of stories that I love to share. Cuz I feel like we can see ourselves in these moments of where we've had some kind of shift and maybe we can see ourselves differently. And like when other people share a story of how they shifted, maybe we can see, okay, this is something I could do to this is something I can get through you know, if they got through that I can probably get through this. That kind of thing. I really want to help share those kind of stories. And that's what I think the podcast is great for. So thank you So much for being here with me in this bonus episode.

I know it was longer than I normally have on my episodes, but I feel like the story is important. And I hope that you are able to get something from it. And let me know go subscribe to the podcast. If you like listening to this, please leave me a five star review. Let me know what you think. I am really excited to keep building this podcast and keep giving you tools to help you live a better life and especially to help you be uniquely you. Because I believe that especially coming from a background where we were taught Well, we all have to think this thing. This is how we need to think in order to get to heaven. Right? Coming from that kind of background, I want to help you discover what are you here to do?

What are you here to think and believe? We're, we're all different. We're all unique. And I think that's the beautiful thing. And I think we all come together in a beautiful way to bring our uniqueness to the world, which is what helps the world thrive, right? So you need to be you like we can't just follow someone else's system or someone else's rules are someone else's beliefs in order to actually live our own unique life. We have to find out what it is we're here to do. Like I love to do that kind of purpose work with people. Thank you for being here and I will talk with you on the next episode. If you enjoyed listening to this podcast, please go subscribe so that you get notified of all the future goodies that are coming along. While you're there. Please leave me a review and let me know what you think. So excited to share this with you and can't wait to talk to you next time.