A Santa Clarita grief counseling expert opened up about her own story of loss after her 10-year-old nephew, Austin, drowned while on a family vacation in 2006.

Speaking to other grievers during the latest “The Grief Recovery Hour” on KHTS, Certified Grief Recovery Specialist Sharon Brubaker said, “I’m not going to tell you how you feel, because you already know. At best, I can tell you what it felt like when my broken heart occurred.”

She continued, “I’m going to go back and tell you guys the story of my loss and allow you in on this very precious moment in my life.”

Related: Santa Clarita Grief Counseling Expert Invites Energy Mastering Mentor To ‘The Grief Recovery Hour’

It was Father’s Day weekend in 2006, and Brubaker, who had stayed home from her family’s trip to Lake Havasu, received a call from her daughter that would change her life.

“She screamed into the phone, ‘Mom, I lost Austin,’” Brubaker recalled. “This little voice inside my head said, ‘Be strong. Just be strong.’ And I said, ‘Honey, he’s there somewhere. I know he’s just walked off.’ She said, ‘No, we have his shoes, we have his shoes.’ I didn’t quite get the correlation to the shoes, so I just kept trying to be strong, which is what the little voice was telling me. And then she started to cry through a million tears, and she lowered her voice and she said, ‘I’m so scared.’ And my heart leaped into my throat, and again that little voice said, ‘You got this. Just don’t let her know you’re scared.’ And my knees went weak, and I fell to the ground.”

Three hours later, Brubaker received the devastating news that Austin had drowned.

“I literally felt as if a knife was stabbed clear through my heart,” she said. “I was in shock and my body went numb. We found out that the ground was about 120 degrees, hence the correlation to the shoes that I wasn’t sure why (my daughter) kept mentioning the shoes, but they knew that he could not have walked off.”

Brubaker was tasked with telling her sister, Erica — who had also stayed home from the vacation — that her son had died.

“She looked at me like, ‘Please, please tell me something good. Give me some good news,’” Brubaker said. “Again, the voice said to me, ‘Just tell her the truth.’ And I just looked right at her and I said, ‘Erica, I’m so sorry. Austin died.’ It changed my life… My life will never be the same.”

Instead of grieving for her own loss, Brubaker then took it upon herself to “be strong” for her sister, calling her on the phone every single day to check in.

“I thought that she was going to grieve and I was going to be her support,” Brubaker said. “No matter what we were talking about, she always turned it back to, ‘And then you knocked on my door.’ And she would repeat the entire story of her finding out about Austin and everything that transpired after that.”

Though she didn’t know it at the time, Brubaker realizes now that those who are grieving often need to talk about what happened in order to process it.

“I feel like it’s almost how they get the information into their brain,” she said. “We literally go numb and we can’t believe it. We have this disbelief, but by talking about it, it allows a little bit of the information to seep in. And so she would tell the story over and over again.”

At this point in her life, Brubaker hadn’t yet found the Grief Recovery program, and she said she didn’t really know anything about grief apart from what she found on an online search of the “five stages of grief,” which include denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

“But we couldn’t quite figure them out,” Brubaker recalled. “There were questions we had every day. How do you go through the stages, do they go in order, are they random, is (it) one day you’re in one stage and the next day you’re in another stage? It was very hard for us to figure out.”

About eight months later, Brubaker discovered Grief Recovery and made the decision to sign up herself, Erica and her daughter. What she learned at that first class would change her life forever.

“Our instructor said to us, ‘Grief is a normal and natural reaction to a loss of any kind,’” Brubaker said. “It’s normal and natural to grieve, we just were never taught how to do it. The second thing she said to us is that there are no stages of grief and loss, and Erica and I both sighed the heaviest sigh you can imagine, because we literally knew something was wrong with these stages and we couldn’t get them to fit in.”

What Brubaker learned was that the stages were actually based on a study of those who had been diagnosed with a terminal illness and were facing their own mortality. Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the psychiatrist who conducted the study, wrote a book about her findings, called, “On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families.”

“This book started to be used in psychology courses and in colleges,” Brubaker explained. “What they did was they changed the title of the book ‘On Death and Dying’ and started talking about the stages that a grieving person would go through… One of the famous quotes from Dr. Kubler-Ross is that she stresses the fact that the book … was not meant to be the stages for a grieving person: ‘First, On Death and Dying is a study of dying people, not on grief and bereavement.’”

Just a few of the other powerful concepts Brubaker learned during her Grief Recovery method experience include the following:

• Grief is a conflicting feeling caused by the end or a change in a familiar pattern.
• Grief is also the feeling of reaching out for someone who has always been there, only to discover they are no longer there.
• Instead of stages, there are some typical responses associated with grief that don’t come in order, and the griever may or may not experience one, two, or all of them, including but not limited to: reduced concentration, a sense of numbness, disruptive sleep patterns, a change in eating habits, a rollercoaster of emotions and more.
• There are 43 known losses that a person can experience over a lifetime. Death and divorce are the most popular, but other forms of loss include marital separation, having a family member in prison, personal injury, illness, change in financial status and more.

To find out more about Brubaker’s journey with Grief Recovery and how she is now using her experience to help others as a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist, watch the YouTube video above or click here for the podcast.

Santa Clarita grief counseling expert Sharon Brubaker has over 11 years of experience as a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist. The grief counseling expert specializes in the Grief Recovery Method in Santa Clarita, and offers an 8-week education program that she teaches in person, utilizing her free eBook titled “Grief Recovery.” As a grief counseling expert, Santa Clarita residents dealing with loss or other unfinished business who desire a lasting change can be guided on their journey of pain to find healing in their lives.

Sharon Brubaker

Certified Grief Recovery Specialist

27772 Avenue Scott

Valencia, CA 91355

661-212-0720

Sharon Brubaker, Valencia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcVWilziMeY

Grief, Santa Clarita Grief Counseling, Grief Counseling, Grief Recovery, Recovery, Sharon Brubaker, Dealing with Loss, Unfinished Business