All You Have to Do Is Show Up
Tina arrives at session two with a plan already off the rails — her grandmother passed away days earlier, and she barely made it to the call at all. She admits, half-apologizing, that she didn't keep up with the food journal or book the doctor's appointment she promised. Danna shuts the guilt down immediately: showing up today, having just lost someone, already counts as doing enough.
What unfolds instead is a session about grief and the inheritance of not being allowed to have it. Tina's mother, raised in a household steeped in tradition, told her not to cry — that tears would hold her grandmother's spirit back from moving on. Tina finds herself caught between the urge to sob and a lifetime of learning that emotions get swallowed, not spoken. She's also wrestling with how to explain death to her two-year-old daughter, who's already perceptive enough to ask if mommy is sad.
Danna reframes the inherited silence for what it is: a well-meaning but harmful pattern, one that turns unexpressed grief into anger down the line. She encourages Tina to let herself cry freely, to name the emotion out loud instead of burying it, and to recognize her mother not as an all-knowing authority but as a flawed, loving human doing her best with the tools she was given. The through-line becomes generational — Tina doesn't want to pass the same suppression on to her own daughter, and Danna reminds her that modeling vulnerability now is the best gift she can give her.
Rather than piling on new tasks, Danna scales the plan back to match where Tina actually is. The goals for the next few weeks: grieve properly, even if that means taking time off work to be present "in spirit" for a funeral she can't attend in person, follow up on the doctor's appointment already in motion, and jot down a simple running list of symptoms on her phone ahead of that visit — physical or emotional, gut-related or not, all of it worth bringing in. Danna adds one small, low-effort tool for sleep: ten minutes barefoot on the grass before bed, for grounding. Tina leaves relieved to realize she has a full month before their next call, and cautiously hopeful she can honor her grandmother without letting the grief take over everything else.
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Chapters:
00:00 Grief and Overwhelm
03:11 Culture Clash Around Mourning
09:38 Talking to Kids About Death
17:28 Reframing Mom Dynamics
20:04 Vulnerability and Growing Up
24:01 Goals Grief and Better Sleep
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