The Spirit Vessel Professionals Perspectives in Deathcare series aims to help bring awareness, acceptance, and normalization to death and the grieving process. Throughout this series, we interview professionals of all types in the deathcare and emotional wellness space including hospice nurses, grief counselors and coaches, death doulas, funeral directors, life insurance agents, celebrants, alternative disposition advocates, and social workers just to name a few.
In this interview, we speak with Marie Goudreau who is a grief coach, end-of-life specialist, and founder of Empowered Through Grief who walks the path of healing with women who have suffered a profound loss.
Marie Goudreau specializes in creating brave spaces for women to be seen, heard and witnessed in the fullness of their experience of loss. Marie’s approach is based on the assumption that you are the expert of your own grief and her work focuses on guiding you back home to yourself so that you can find meaning in your life in the “after”. Having lost her partner to cancer, her guidance and coaching comes from both education and personal experience which allows her to deeply relate to her client’s experience of grief and loss. She is the founder of Empowered Through Grief, a coaching practice and community that provides a safe space for healing and post-traumatic growth for women grieving all types of loss.
In this conversation we discuss:
- How the diagnosis of her best friend and life partner led her to grief work.
- Her experience as a primary caregiver, advocate, and facilitator of the death experience her life partner wished to have.
- The role social media has played for her as an outlet for connection to others going through her similar experience of young widowhood, being a caregiver, and the trauma that she has experienced.
- Her work in helping people figure out what their grief shows up as in their life, how it manifests in your life, what are the coping mechanisms that you go to naturally and how do they help or hinder you. Creates a space where people can come and tell the truth and make sense of this huge thing with another human, with another heart present in the room.
- Why she believes ritual and ceremony become even more important as individuals begin to re-engage and rebuild their new life after their loss.
- Where future chapters of her work might lead her, and what she’s excited and passionate about in end of life care.
LISTEN TO THE CONVERSATION HERE
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