David Kessler and Brené Brown on grief and finding meaning

This is a fantastic episode of Brené Brown’s podcast Unlocking Us, where she chats to David Kessler one of the most well-known specialists in grief. They discuss his book Finding Meaning, his work with Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and the collective grief we all experienced during the Covid pandemic.

They touch on the stages of grief that most of us are aware of and even though Kessler was integral in that work and introduces meaning as a sixth stage, he stresses that these are not rigid. He says that everyone he speaks to that’s grieving doesn’t care about what stage they’re in. What the stages can do is provide a ‘scaffolding’ to our own process, and Brown says she also feels they help normalise grief when you can relate to common feelings within the stages.

Kessler discusses the loss of his son, and how it put his work of 40 years as a counsellor into another light and triggered him to continue his work around meaning. He describes meaning as a ‘cushion’ that comes after acceptance. They discuss how meaning cannot replace the pain and sometimes we can try to find meaning too early on in our grief.

They also talk about judgment, Kessler says “Judgement demands punishment.” Both agree that judging others grief is very common but is what leads to feelings of isolation. It is pointless comparing our grief with others, as Kessler says, “The worst loss is always your loss.”

We’d highly recommend listening to this episode, it starts off feeling like it’s for people working in the grief space but then gets into a really open and inspiring conversation that we think will really resonate with anyone, no matter their ‘stage’ of grief!