In today’s episode, you’re going to learn what nobody tells you about grief and loss. Whether you’ve lost someone recently, years ago, or are anticipating a loss, this conversation will give you clarity, relief, and a way forward. Or if someone you love is grieving and you feel helpless and want to know how to support them, after this conversation you will know exactly what to say and do. Joining Mel today is David Kessler, one of the world’s most renowned experts on grief and loss and bestselling author of eight books, who has spent more than 40 years helping millions of people through the hardest moments of their lives. David has lived profound loss himself, and he brings a rare combination of research, compassion, honesty, and hard-earned wisdom. What he shares today will change the way you understand grief, your own emotions, and what healing actually looks like. In this episode, you’ll learn: -The real reason grief feels so confusing (and why you’re not “doing it wrong”) -The biggest mistakes people make when they’re grieving -What to say (and what never to say) when someone you love is grieving - Why waves of sadness hit you out of nowhere - What grief bursts and love bursts are and what they mean -Why guilt is so common after loss and how to release it -How to carry your love forward without being trapped in pain -The surprising ways laughter and anger help you heal Today, David offers you a simple framework to live with more peace, grace, and meaning after loss. If you’ve ever felt alone in your grief, confused by your emotions, or pressured to “move on,” this conversation is for you.You are not doing it wrong. You are not alone.And with David’s clear, compassionate guidance, you’ll understand how healing can become possible. For more resources related to today’s episode, click here for the podcast episode page. As a gift to listeners of The Mel Robbins Podcast, Mel has created a free 20-page workbook to help you make 2026 a great year. This workbook is designed using the latest research to help you get clear about what you want and empower you to take the next step forward in your life. And the cool part? It takes less than a minute for you to get your hands on it. Just sign up at melrobbins.com/bestyear. If you liked the episode, check out this one next: Why You Feel Lost in Life: Dr. Gabor Maté on Trauma & How to HealConnect with Mel: Get Mel’s newsletter, packed with tools, coaching, and inspiration.Get Mel’s #1 bestselling book, The Let Them TheoryGet on the waitlist for Pure GeniusWatch the episodes on YouTubeFollow Mel on Instagram The Mel Robbins Podcast InstagramMel's TikTok Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes ad-freeDisclaimer Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Today, you and I are going to cover a topic that over 18,000 of you have emailed in asking me to get a world-class expert to come talk about. It is one of the most requested topics that I've never discussed on this podcast. What Nobody Tells You About Grief and Loss. And I want to say something before we jump in. Thank you.
Thank you for hitting play. This can be a hard topic for every one of us to lean into. And so I am so proud of you and proud of myself for being here. Now, I've waited until now to have this conversation because I needed the right person to guide you and me through this topic.
Chapter 2: How can understanding grief help those who are grieving?
And that person is David Kessler. David has over 30 years of experience helping people through unimaginable loss, and David also knows what it's like to lose someone. He's lived it, he's studied it, he's taught it, and today he is here in our Boston studios for you and the people that you care about.
He's going to walk you through the science and process of healing from grief, and he's also going to explain why love and grief are a package deal. He'll share what no one else tells you about grief and loss, and he's going to do it in a way that you've never heard before.
This conversation is also about what comes next, living with grief with more peace, more grace, more laughter, and more meaning. You're going to discover how to carry your love forward without being trapped in pain or guilt. You're going to get the tools for how to deal with intense emotions when they crash in.
And you're also going to learn what to say and the things to never say in grief, whether you're the one grieving and you're saying it to yourself or you're just trying to support someone who is.
By the end of our conversation, you're going to feel less alone and you're going to look at this topic and what's possible completely differently because it's going to open the door to healing, happiness, hope, and give you the roadmap to living a more meaningful life after loss. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am really excited that you're here.
It is always an honor to be together and to spend this time with you. And if you're a new listener, or you're here because somebody shared this episode with you, I wanted to personally take a moment and welcome you to the Mel Robbins Podcast family.
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Chapter 3: What are the common mistakes people make while grieving?
And I also wanted to thank you for hitting play on an extraordinarily important topic. Joining us in our Boston studios is one of the world's most trusted voices on grief and loss, David Kessler. David is the founder of grief.com, an online platform with workbooks, workshops, and support groups that have helped over 5 million people navigate every kind of grief that you can experience in life.
David has also spent over 30 years training doctors, nurses, counselors, and first responders on grief. He's also the bestselling author of eight books. And across all of his work, David Kessler gives voice to what nobody tells you about grief and loss. David's wisdom doesn't just come from research or decades of counseling other people. It also comes from his own painful lived experience.
David lost his mother at the age of 13, and David's son died at the age of 21 in a very tragic and unexpected way. Both experiences have had a profound impact on the way that he thinks about grief, the way that he talks about it, and how equipped he is and skilled he is in guiding you and your loved ones through the experience of it. This isn't going to be depressing.
You and I are going to feel less alone. We're going to laugh. David's going to drop a few F-bombs because sometimes that's how you feel when you're going through loss. And one more thing. This isn't an easy topic. And so I wanted to say I'm so proud of you for pressing play and for being here. And I'm also grateful for how you're going to share this with the people that you care about.
This conversation is a gift to all of us, and I am glad you are here to experience it. All right.
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Chapter 4: What should you never say to someone who is grieving?
Please help me welcome David Kessler to the Mel Robbins Podcast. It is so great to see you. Thank you, thank you, thank you for making the trip here to Boston to be on the Mel Robbins podcast.
I am thrilled to be here.
How does it feel to know that this is the topic that is one of the most requested topics that we have received from listeners around the world?
I know it. You know it. It is the most needed, requested topic that no one wants to talk about.
I want to start by having you talk about how is my life going to be different if I take everything to heart that you're about to share with us and I apply it to my life? How will my life be different?
This is going to sound strange, but I can almost guarantee it. If you were to do this work, listen to this, share it, your life is going to be fuller and bigger. And it's going to be richer. And I'm evidence of that. You know, loss is about subtraction. We need to find ways to bring addition into this.
And so I'm going to throw every tool I can think of at everyone, at everyone, to really help folks have ways to find their inner wholeness.
Well, what's interesting as I listen to you already is nobody can go through life without experiencing some kind of devastating loss.
I have been studying the statistics. Here they are. It's a trend. Death rate, 100%. 100%. I don't mean to laugh. Listen, and I always tell people, to begin with, you come from a long line of dead people.
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Chapter 5: How do grief bursts and love bursts affect our emotions?
Like every ancestor you have has died. There is something in us that knows how to do this. I'm teaching people what our great-grandparents knew how to do. And the thing is, today, if people can find a way to grieve fully, they will live fully.
If people can find a way to grieve fully, they can live fully.
And let me tell you the most bizarrest concept. I spent so much of my life in hotel meeting rooms. giving talks. You know, there were days it was 10 people and 50 people and 300 people. And after the talks, it happened more than once. We're in a large meeting room, the hotel, there's the realtors are in the next room. And after the day, the staff would say, what were you teaching?
And I would go, why? And they would go, because your room was laughing the most. And I would go, grief. And they would go, what kind of grief? I'd go, that kind of grief, like someone's dying or someone's already died. And they couldn't understand it. And here's why that happens. Loss in our life pushes our bandwidth for pain, but it also pushes our bandwidth for happiness and joy and laughter.
People in my rooms learning about it They probably did cry a little harder, but they also laughed harder.
I love that promise that in grief, yes, it expands your capacity to feel pain, but it also expands your capacity to feel joy and laughter and all of these other aspects of life. And you say that not just as somebody, David, who has spent your life
Counseling people going through grief, educating other health practitioners, mental health practitioners, medical professionals in the actual... Teach doctors how to give bad news. Yeah, like in the field of grief. But you experienced a loss of your own. Your son, David, died. And that shifted how you think about and how you talk about grief. So could you just share...
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Chapter 6: What is the role of guilt in the grieving process?
what happened with your son.
Sure. And let me start with, I was a grief expert for decades. I had lost my mother when I was 13, horrible tragedy. So I grew up in grief and was looking for my own healing. And I'll tell you, when my mom died when I was young, and people will get this, thought it was the only person that ever lost a parent. Like, I didn't know this happened to other people at 13. You asked about my son, David.
I adopted two boys, four and five years old. David had been born drug-exposed. I really thought love would conquer all. They had an amazing childhood, great childhood. And when he hit his teenage years, his trauma and addiction began to come up. And I was thrown into that hell that anyone who's living with a loved one with addiction knows what that's like.
And he worked so hard to get through that. And he struggled and struggled and made it and was doing well and met an incredible social worker. He was dating. And at 21, was in programs, sober, doing well. He and his girlfriend hit a bump that anyone at 21-year-olds do. Called up some friends.
They got high again. They lived. He died. I was on the floor.
And I'll tell you, I didn't know if I would get up again. One of the things I remember people always want to know, like, What did you learn that you didn't know? How intense the pain can be. I had forgotten that.
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Chapter 7: How can laughter and anger contribute to healing?
I wanted to write every parent that ever had a child die that I'd counseled a note saying, I didn't get it. And then I got to tell you, I was someone who used to dish out, oh, go to a grief group, read a book, you know, go to a grief counselor. And then I had to do that, Mel. And I went to a grief group. It took me three times to get there.
I went to a grief group, took my contacts out, put my glasses on, baseball cap. I had to literally sit five feet from my books. And I couldn't tell anyone. I'm that expert. I couldn't be him. I actually was in that place, so stuck, didn't know if I'd come out of it. And that's an important place we go through. If you haven't been stuck, you haven't been in grief.
How did that experience of losing your son, David, shift the way you understand and talk about grief?
First of all, the biggest thing is I got to tell you, when people show up for themselves, when they reach out to a friend, and like if you're a friend, you need to listen to this. If someone reaches out to you, your job is to applaud them. If they say, I'm stuck, I need help, I don't know what to do next, applaud them for reaching out. It's so hard to do.
I think that's the biggest thing I want everyone to know. Just, you gotta reach out for help. And it's the hardest thing in the world. And we live in a grief-illiterate world that thinks it's like TV. We've all seen TV, right? TV episodes are episode one, person dies. Episode two, we cry. Episode three, back to life. Grief has a longer shadow. Grief is in three episodes. What is it?
I'll tell you something that'll blow you away.
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Chapter 8: What steps can you take to support someone who is grieving?
Tell me. Talk to a lot of my colleagues. When do you think is the time most people reach out to a professional and say, I hope this was going away. I was wishing it away. I thought I was kind of working on it, but I need some support. One month, six months, nine months, five years. Five years? Five years, Mel. People are living with pain five years before they reach out.
And Mel, those are the lucky ones because there's a lot of people that never reach out. Don't we know them? Yes. Don't you all have someone in your life that like something happened and they just never recovered?
I want to stay on this for a minute because I do observe that sort of with some people, the tragedy happens or the death happens. You spend a week or two celebrating the person, planning. It's a flurry of people and the memorial and the celebration. And then for a lot of people, it's like, let's move on.
Now, I have a name for them. What is it? Practical grievers. Practical grievers? Practical grievers. Okay. That's okay. That's who they are. And by the way, they were practical about everything. They were practical about the divorce, practical about the move. They were practical. That's just who they are. It's going to be.
And we always think, oh, when they get to a big moment, a big loss, they're going to change. They don't. They're consistent. And it drives everyone else nuts. Because we think they don't have enough feelings. And by the way, they think we have way too many feelings. So these are just different styles of grieving. And that's okay. We don't need to change them. They don't need to change us.
If you're listening and you either are like, oh, yes, that family is definitely practical grievers, or my brother is a practical griever, or you're listening and you're like, oh, well, that's me. What do you want us to know about what's going on beneath the surface when somebody is very practical and then we move on, but something's lingering? What do you want us to know?
Well, I would first ask, is the something lingering a projection of ours or is it real? Because in real practical grievers, nothing's lingering. For real? For real. That's possible? Yep. They're done. They went to the funeral. I mean, a practical griever doesn't go to therapy. I mean, a practical griever will say, therapy? I got friends for that. Why would I ever go to a therapist or a coach?
Why would I do that? No, practical grievers have events and move on. That's them. Nothing wrong with them. It's just they're from another planet. Most of us on this planet don't get them. But it's okay. It's okay. We need to make sure we're not going to practical grievers for support. Oh, because they're very pragmatic, and that's how they deal with grief.
It's time.
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