You Don't Have to Be Okay: Redefining Resilience After Loss
You've probably been told that resilience means bouncing back, pushing through, and getting back to normal as quickly as possible. But what if that's not resilience at all? What if it's actually suppression masquerading as strength?
In this episode, Kendra walks you through what happened when she lost her daughter at 40 weeks and 5 days, lost her father, and had surgery—all within months—while being expected to just keep functioning like nothing happened. She reveals:
The difference between toxic resilience (the mask) and real resilience (the path to yourself)
How to stop performing strength and start listening to what your emotions are actually telling you
A simple 3-step framework to transform grief into genuine healing and clarity
Why discovering who you are when you stop running from your feelings is the real work
This isn't about being okay. It's about being real.
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If this resonated with you and you're ready to go deeper, I'd love to invite you to explore working together. My group program, Centered and Alive, starts in September and is capped at 15 women so we can create a truly safe space to feel your feelings and rediscover who you are when you stop running.
👉 Schedule a free discovery call with me
Listen to the Episode on A Little More You Podcast
Now, I'd love to hear from you.
Here's what I’m curious about: What definition of resilience have you been taught or believed in? And does what I talked about in this episode shift anything for you?
Share your thoughts in the comments below.
With endless love and appreciation for being here,
Kendra 💜
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Truth After Loss. I'm Kindra Merrill, and this is a space that you can explore the truths that grief shows you and the life that you build from it. Because grief doesn't lie. It reveals to us what matters and what never did. So settle in, and let's build a life around that truth I'm gonna start this podcast off with a question. My question for you is: what have you been taught or what do you believe resilience is? What is an example of what you would think resilience would look like? And you can answer this in the comments below, but also just like I want you to witness what that is for you before I start going through this podcast because I want you to notice where some of what I talk about might be in alignment with your version but maybe not your truth.
[00:01:08] So that's why I wanted you to think about that as we get started here today. I live in the US and here we have been taught that resilience really means to push through, to get back to normal, to recover quickly, to spring back into shape as fast as you can.
[00:01:32] And not only is that the cultural message, but our systems around us are designed to enable that cultural expectation. I'll give you, a little example. I've talked about this a lot on the podcast. I will continue to, I experienced the stillbirth of my daughter. We were 40 w- weeks and five days along in the pregnancy.
[00:01:55] And afterwards, the only reason I got any leave was because I birthed her, so I was on short-term disability because I had a baby. Had a baby. But I had no baby. my leave was not given to me because I lost a child. It was given to me because I birthed a child. And in the process of all of that, my dad died while I was on leave.
[00:02:16] I had another surgery while I was on leave. So all of that, that whole experience, the only reason I had any leave was because I was birthing a child, not because I lost one. There was no leave associated with the loss of my dad or the loss of my daughter. I might have gotten a day or two for each. so that's what I mean when I say our structures are designed really to align to this cultural expectation of "Just get back to normal."
[00:02:45] I remember at one point shortly after going back to work after that whole experience, one of my coworkers looked at me, and she was just like, "I don't understand how you're functioning. I don't understand how you're here." And I just looked at her, and I was like, "What else am I supposed to do? Like-" They don't, they're, I don't have any more leave.
[00:03:04] I have to have a job. I have to pay my bills. I have to show up here. What else am I supposed to do? So our whole system and our cultural belief that we've been taught is that we are supposed to be able to jump back into life after a loss. And so what ends up happening is we put on a mask.
[00:03:28] We go to work, we go to the events, we go to the parties, we show up at the grocery store, and we feel like we're sleepwalking through life. And people are asking, "How are you? How are you doing?" And you say, "I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine." And underneath, you know that you aren't. Because that's not real resilience, it's suppression with a better name.
[00:03:56] And if this hits home for you, take a deep breath I'm here for you. I understand. I know what it feels like to show up in a life every day where you're telling your everybody you're fine, but really you're not. And I would also say that it's okay to not be okay, especially if you've gone through some sort of loss.
[00:04:21] I actually did a workshop, several months ago, and one of the people in the room was expressing her kind of anticipatory grief about when her parents die. Her parents weren't even sick, but the people around her in the room and the conversations we were having were about, the loss of parents. And her comment was, "I'm so glad to see other people who have been through it so that I know that I'm gonna be okay."
[00:04:50] And I looked at her and said, "I'm so glad that's helpful for you, and it's okay if you're not okay." Because there's this cultural expectation that we're supposed to be okay after we go through some sort of a loss or grief
[00:05:05] And suppressing our grief through productivity, staying busy, through strength. She's so strong. How many times have you heard that shit? She's so strong. Bullshit. In the background, she is falling apart. She looks strong, but maybe she's not, and that's okay, too. We perform the resilience that's required of us out in the world that's expected of us.
[00:05:30] We avoid our own feelings, and we find ways to distract ourselves from feeling all of the emotions, which I totally understand. I, I absolutely understand the desire to want to distract from our feelings because, again, if you listened to my previous podcast, we haven't been taught to feel our feelings.
[00:05:57] And so it feels easier for us to distract ourselves than to feel our feelings because we've never been taught how. But as I talked about in the last podcast, the last episode, that all comes with a cost because grief, emotions. Emotions are energy, and energy has to go somewhere. And if we don't process that, the energy resides in our body.
[00:06:24] The energy of all of that grief, the energy of all of that anger, the energy of all of that desperation that we have for it to be the way that it was, whatever it might be for you, it resides in our body if we don't work with it, if we don't sit with it And I talked a lot more about that in the last episode.
[00:06:41] So if that, feels like something that speaks to you, go back and listen to that episode if you haven't, because it does impact our bodies. It shows up in our bodies and has an impact and has a cost if we don't process it. So real resilience asks something different of us. It asks us to pause and to witness our grief, to sit and feel our feelings instead of trying to outrun them To let our emotions reside and to witness what's actually happening inside our bodies instead of managing how it looks on the outside.
[00:07:20] And I know that's hard in our culture because we're just not used to, people crying on the streets is not comfortable for everyone. And I'm not saying that's the way we express ourselves. But, in a work meeting where you tear up and people might look at you strange, speaking from experience, where you have an emotion and the workplace is not comfortable with you having emotion even if you just lost your child.
[00:07:49] that kind of thing. can we allow some space to witness what's happening inside of you instead of having to manage how it looks on the outside? Instead of me trying to hold it all in because it makes other people feel uncomfortable in the work environment if I have an emotion about the fact that I lost a, a child.
[00:08:09] And I say all of this because When we, let's wrap this back around to resilience. When we think about being resilient and we think about it from a grief context, and I will just say, let's just put it out there first of all, like You don't have to be okay. You don't have to be resilient. And there is some value in thinking about your constructs and your beliefs about - what resilience is, because it can show up as toxic resilience, where you're just performing, you're putting on the mask, you're showing up, you're saying you're fine, but underneath you're really not.
[00:08:48] That's actually toxic resilience, not actual real resilience. So let's talk about what real resilience looks like, and what I believe it can guide us towards. So I truly believe that grieving is healing, that feeling our emotions is a healing experience, and I don't believe there is a destination.
[00:09:16] I talked about this in the podcast 10, so episode 10, - I feel like we carry our grief forever and ever. It doesn't go anywhere. So healing is not a destination. It's just an experience, and when we feel our feelings and when we grieve, we heal. We are healing. We are in the experience of healing for the rest of our lives.
[00:09:35] And within that, and I talk about this quite a bit, it, the foundations of my business and what I do and why I'm here with you today is because in the depths of my grief, in the depths of my sorrow, in the darkness, in the despair, not only did I allow myself to feel those feelings, but what I found was those feelings were revealing for me what mattered most in my life and what never did.
[00:10:10] So in the depths of my grief, I found myself. That may sound strange, but here's what I mean by that. Things like when I, I guess maybe a year after I lost my daughter, I remember sitting at a coffee shop and writing, and there were two women sitting next to me, and they were laughing and smiling and joking, and I looked at them and I thought, "Will I ever feel happiness, joy again?"
[00:10:38] Which is a true, real thing after you've lost someone you love. You wonder whether or not that's gonna happen again. But the next question that came up in my grief experience around that was, have I ever really truly found or felt real joy? And what it means for me to feel happy
[00:11:02] my grief brought me an opportunity to sit with and explore what true joy actually means to me, what lights me up, what puts a fire underneath me, what makes me laugh, , what lights me up. Because up until that moment, I'm not sure I knew. I'm not sure I knew what I enjoyed, like truly, really, actually enjoyed.
[00:11:27] I'm not sure I knew that. So Let's go back to resilience here. What I think true resilience is feeling our feelings, allowing our feelings to speak to us, to show us a path towards our true self, a path towards what matters most to us,
[00:11:46] A path towards who you are and how you want to show up in this world. And our grief, our feelings, our emotions all have this information in them that's only available if we allow ourselves, again, to feel our feelings and to sit with them and explore them long enough to maybe hear some of these truths in them.
[00:12:17] Because when we do that and we start to explore like I did, like what does it mean to feel true, real joy in my life? And I started then taking actions, small intentional actions. And I'm not... if you're grieving, this may not be the right place for you. But if you've moved through your grief and you're now exploring some of it a little more deeply, and you're ready to go to the, depths of really understanding the messages that it's sending you or to really go to the depths of what it's revealing to you I started taking action, small intentional actions towards what brings me true joy, what puts me in experiences where I can feel awe.
[00:13:06] as a result of this, I actually created an Awaken Your Inner Joy. It's free. It's a, it's a little journaling, guided journaling experience. If you want that, I'll link it in the show notes here. But because I didn't know what brought me joy. I didn't know what I loved in life, and I didn't know what that felt like.
[00:13:25] And so my grief was taking me to a place where I could explore that.
[00:13:29] And so that's what I think actual, like real resilience looks like is it's not about bouncing back. It's not about
[00:13:39] jumping into what was. To me, resilience, real true resilience comes from discovering who you are when you stop running from how you feel. Because , every time you push through without really, acknowledging that it's okay not to be okay, you abandon yourself just a little bit.
[00:14:06] And I had been abandoning myself for decades really, and I didn't even know it until grief revealed some of that to me. Here's how to think about creating real, true, sustained resilience in your life. You have to feel your feelings.
[00:14:21] We've already established that. I have a whole podcast on it from last, last episode. You have to do that. But then I think we actually have to go one level deeper, which is that you have to really understand, what those feelings are speaking to you.
[00:14:35] And then take some small intentional actions to move towards that. So first step is to feel it. Gotta do that. Again, previous episode helps you to do that
[00:14:45] And then ask yourself, what is the emotion revealing to you about who you are, about the truth of what's happening around you or within you? What is it saying about what actually matters to you in life?
[00:15:01] It, that's not noise. That's your inner knowing starting to speak to you through your emotions and through your grief
[00:15:10] And then as you begin to understand what it's revealing to you, start thinking about taking some action. It can be the tiniest, teeniest, tiny action that's aligned to what it... grief has revealed for you. So I'll give you a really good example of this. when my daughter-- when I went through that whole experience of my daughter, and my dad, and my surgery, and all that, four months after losing her, I created a vision board because my grief immediately was revealing to me two things.
[00:15:48] One, I needed One thing was I needed to just have a picture of what life would look like in the future when it didn't hurt so bad because it hurt so bad I needed something visual. I'm a very visual person. But the other half of that was I needed to take some sort of action on what my grief was telling me about how I wanted to live my life going forward.
[00:16:17] I wasn't making any changes at the time. I was four months into grieving the loss of my daughter and my dad. I was a complete mess. But I felt like I needed to do something to acknowledge and witness what I was feeling, which is I can't keep living my life this way. There has to be something different, and that had nothing to do with the loss of my daughter.
[00:16:39] That had more to do with what was e- what I was experiencing in my life up until the point of losing my daughter. So my tiny little action was to create a vision board. My tiny little action was something is speaking to me. I have to do something about it. over the course of the next eight months, I hired a life coach because I was like, "I need something."
[00:17:02] I started a blog around grief. I wanted... I had all these things that grief was a- was exposing to me, was showing me pathways to expressing myself in a way that I hadn't ever expressed myself before. So that's what I mean when I talk about resilience, and that's what I think true resilience actually is.
[00:17:30] It's not about going back to who you were. It's not about bouncing back. It's not about getting back into shape. it's about going to the depths, feeling your feelings, understanding what those feelings are revealing to you, and then starting to take small intentional actions towards that truth. That's what I believe true resilience actually is.
[00:17:54] Every time that you stop and listen and act from that place within you, that inner wisdom, that inner truth, that's getting - getting you closer to real resilience. And that's a practice. It's not something that happens every day. I still, still go through that experience as we continue to go through multiple losses over the course of the last decade.
[00:18:17] It's a choice
[00:18:18] And so wrapping back to the original question I had for this podcast for you at the beginning of this podcast is, what have you been taught about what resilience looks like? Did any of this that you heard today resonate? And is there an emotion that you have been maybe pushing through that you might wanna sit with for a while and explore, get curious, and maybe see what kind of information it's trying to share with you It's a choice.
[00:18:56] If you wanna go that route, certainly do so. This is the kind of work that I do with clients one-on-one and in my group, program. My programs are called Centered and Alive because I want to create experiences where individuals, women who've gone through grief or loss, have the opportunity to come back to their center and feel alive again.
[00:19:20] And so if that's something that you are interested in, I will, like I said, link to the free, Awaken Your Inner Joy, guided journal experience. But if this-- if any of this is resonating with you, I am a somatic life coach. I do work with people, like I said, individually and in a group setting. If that's something you're interested in, , I would love to invite you to set up a discovery call with me.
[00:19:47] . My group program is actually starting in September. It's capped at 15 women. We keep it a really safe place where you can be vulnerable because I want to make sure that you have a place to express your emotions in a safe environment. if you have any interest in that, if any of this that I talked about today , resonates with you, schedule a discovery call and let's chat.
[00:20:09] Okay? All right. Until next time
[00:20:12] As always, thank you for listening to Truth After Loss. As we leave each other today, I would love to invite you to notice what resonated with you, what kind of sticks, what felt true for you, if anything, and let that guide you gently forward. Not necessarily my words, but what kind of hit you, what struck you, what did you notice resonated with you in your body?
[00:20:38] If you're watching this on YouTube, please subscribe to the show, and if you're listening on your favorite podcast app, follow along so you never miss an episode. Until next time, may you witness what grief has revealed for you and build a life around that truth
Hi there, I’m Kendra.
I’m a woman forever changed by loss and by the quiet clarity that followed. I walked away from the life I was “supposed” to want and began creating one that felt like home.
Now I work with women who are ready to reclaim their identity, their relational sovereignty, and their soulful leadership. The ones who are done shrinking and ready to start living in their truth.