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The #1 Grief Solution You’ve Never Heard Of (Instant Relief)
From Grief to Peace FAST!
Lennox Saint
March 29, 2024
Prefer to learn by listening? Check out the podcast episode of this Lesson here.
7 am. The Banana Boat song that is my alarm tone goes off as I’m lying on the bottom bunk bed in my bedroom.
It’s Tuesday morning.
The date is September 22nd, 2009.
I turned 13 a month ago.
I get dressed for school and walk out of my room, just like any other day.
But today is not any other day.
Dad says, “You’re not going to school today, Lennox.”
We drive to my grandparents’ house.
There’s a deadly silence in the car.
I know something’s wrong.
I know what it is.
I can feel it.
But I wait for confirmation.
It comes a few minutes later when I’m sitting at the dining table of my grandparents’ home and told that my mum killed herself a few hours ago.
It takes me a few seconds to register what I’ve just been told.
And then it hits me as if I've stepped beneath a waterfall flowing from the skies; the impact intensified by the full force of gravity.
My mum’s gone.
I start screaming and balling my eyes out.
I’ve never felt so sorry for myself.
I felt like the unluckiest person ever. A victim.
I’ve since created a grief solution that provides instant relief and has helped me turn my life around.
But this solution doesn’t only apply to grief. It’s a tool you can easily apply to everything.
Get cut off in traffic? Use this solution.
Lose your job and have no money? Use this solution
Get diagnosed with depression, anxiety and ADHD? Use this solution.
Why am I sharing the solution with you?
I want to celebrate my mum and her memory.
I want to normalise loss and grief. Everyone experiences it, but no one talks about it. That’s stupid.
Because when no one talks about loss and grief, we fall victim to this:
Grief Tunnel Vision
Grief Tunnel Vision (GTV) is the narrow perspective that views grief exclusively as a negative experience, ignoring its potential for personal growth and healing.
There are 2 main reasons why GTV is bad:
Isolation and Disconnection:
GTV makes you feel isolated. You tell yourself that other people can’t understand your experience.
So you withdraw from social activities and important relationships; feeling lonelier and more disconnected than ever.
This is how I felt going back to school a month after my mum died.
I didn’t want all the attention on me, and I hated the idea of everyone thinking “Lennox is back. His mum’s dead. We need to tread carefully.”
Paradoxically, all of this attention made me feel more isolated and disconnected than ever.
Shame:
Shame is a combination of feeling regret, guilt, and embarrassment about something you’ve done or the circumstances you were in. It’s a deeply personal and painful experience.
I felt ashamed and embarrassed about my mum’s death. As though I was the dude whose mum died and that made me weird. It was ‘my thing’.
One example of this shame occurred during a Year 7 recess at school.
I’d recently befriended a new student named Ben.
Ben and I were with my best mate, Jordan.
Ben wanted to fill up his drink bottle, so the three of us started walking to the drink fountain.
He didn’t know about ‘my thing’.
It felt like a weight I needed to get off my shoulders, but I was too ashamed to do it myself.
So I hastily pulled Jordan aside while Ben was filling up his bottle and quickly whispered to him, “Can you tell Ben about my mum?” And I walked away.
I didn’t wait for a response. I didn’t even look Jordan in the eyes when I asked.
I felt ashamed of ‘my thing’.
That’s what GTV does…
Here’s a technique I use to overcome it.
Perspective Pivoting
Perspective Pivoting (PP) is the conscious act of adjusting your viewpoint to better cope with challenging situations.
PP helps you get the most value from the #1 grief solution that’s coming up in the next section.
Perspective Pivoting has two main benefits:
Resilience:
Practising PP develops resilience and better equips you to handle future challenges.
Each future challenge is a Boss Level in the Game of Life.
As you level up, the challenges from lower Boss Levels seem easier because you’ve adapted to the difficulty of higher levels.
My mum’s death levelled me up very quickly. It made me resilient to most other Boss Levels because they paled in comparison.
A good example of this is when I wasn’t selected to become prefect in Year 12.
I was disappointed, sure, but in the Game of Life, ‘Not becoming prefect’ was Boss Level 5/100 and ‘Mum dying when I was 13’ was Boss Level 85/100.
The difficulty of overcoming the former was nothing compared to the latter.
Guiding Star:
Perspective Pivoting helps you harness the power of The Guiding Star Principle.
When a loved one dies, they become a star in the sky.
You’re the only one who can see it. And it’s up there every single day.
Whenever you’re feeling lost, your Guiding Star will show you the way.
Requel (my mum) is my Guiding Star.
She’s helped me make the most important decisions of my life.
Whenever I’m at a crossroads, I look up to the sky and wonder, ‘What would Requel want me to do?’ The answer is always obvious.
This very question led me to:
Quit the law and share my ideas with the world.
Requel would not want me to be depressed and miserable.
See the light.
There’s a lot of darkness in the world today. But I choose to focus on the light.
The light her star emits. Because that’s what Requel would want me to do.
The Guiding Star Principle is the most powerful tool in my toolbox.
You can only have it if you’ve experienced immense loss and grief. This is why it’s so powerful. With immense loss and grief comes immense power.
You’re harnessing the energy of a star.
If you want to turn grief into growth, you need to avoid Grief Tunnel Vision and embrace Perspective Pivoting. Here’s how.
Triangle Therapy: How To Overcome Grief in 3 Simple Steps
Triangle Therapy is the #1 grief solution you’ve never heard of. It’s how you can find instant relief after a loss. It’s how I do every single day.
Triangle Therapy (TT) is a 3-step process that recognises every situation has negative, neutral and positive aspects.
Each aspect of a situation represents each apex of a triangle. Hence, Triangle Therapy.
The 3-step process of Triangle Therapy:
1. Recognise the situation’s negative aspects
E.g. After 15 years since my mum died, I’ve realised the worst part of not having her around anymore is not necessarily missing out on big events, like graduations or birthdays.
It’s missing out on the little things.
I don’t get to blast the Black Eyed Peas album Monkey Business in the car with her anymore.
I don’t get to introduce her to my partner.
I don’t get to tease her for being bad at using technology.
2. Recognise the situation’s neutral aspects
E.g. My mum died. Death is a natural part of life.
It’s a process everyone witnesses and experiences at some point.
It’s shit my mum died earlier than most, but it’s a potent reminder of the human experience of mortality. That life is precious.
3. Recognise the situation’s positive aspects
Augmented Awareness helps you do this.
Check out Lesson 1 for more info.
E.g. After Mum died in 2009 I eventually pivoted my perspective from the negative apex to the neutral one.
But I struggled to pivot from neutral to positive.
And then I went on an immersion program in the Philippines in 2014.
I spent a week living with a local family in an impoverished area of a remote Filipino island.
After my first night with the family, I remember waking up to see this family of eight waiting for me at the breakfast table.
I hadn’t seen smiles so warm, genuine and heartfelt before. I’ve never seen them since.
At this moment, everything changed.
If this Filipino family before me can be so genuinely happy just to have me live with them for a week, despite living in relative poverty, showering with buckets of water, having rice and coke for every meal of the day, and sleeping on wooden beds — all in a hut the size of my lounge room — then I too can be happy.
At that moment I realised:
I was blessed to have a mother who loved me.
I was the luckiest person in the world to be given every opportunity to succeed.
I can choose to see my mother’s life as a beautiful thing, despite how short it was.
At this moment, I realised I was not a victim of the story. I am the author.
What happened in the past need not determine what will in the future.
Those words are still unwritten.
And I can pivot my perspective to focus on the positive aspects of every situation as I write them.
Simple Summary
Grief Tunnel Vision (GTV) = The narrow perspective that views grief exclusively as a negative experience, ignoring its potential for personal growth and healing.
Perspective Pivoting (PP) = The conscious act of adjusting one's viewpoint to better cope with challenging situations.
Guiding Star Principle (GSP) = The idea of using the memory of a lost loved one as a guiding force for decision-making and personal growth.
Triangle Therapy (TT) = A 3-step process of recognising the negative, neutral and positive aspects of every situation.
The Lesson
Overcome Grief Tunnel Vision through Perspective Pivoting and Triangle Therapy.
Cya
To close, a quote from the word wizard himself.
If you’d like to have a chat about grief with me, check out Saints College.
It’s an online community that has weekly chats about what I talk about in these Lessons.
If that’s not for you, no worries.
Just please speak your grief.
That’s it for this Lesson.
Keep it simple until the next one.