“Many grieving people genuinely think they are losing themselves, when in reality their brain and body are adapting to profound change.”
In this episode, I sit down with Sylvia Wolfer for a conversation about what grief does beneath the surface. Sylvia is a grief coach and educator whose work lives at the intersection of grief, neuroscience, mindfulness, and movement.
We talk about grief as more than an emotional experience. Grief can affect memory, attention, sleep, energy, decision-making, the nervous system, identity, relationships, and the way a person moves through daily life. But underneath all of it, this conversation is about helping people understand that they are not broken. They are responding to loss.
We talk about:
- Why grief is not only emotional
- How grief affects the brain, body, and nervous system
- The tension between being capable and deeply impacted
- What reduced capacity can look like after loss
- How grief can reshape identity and a person’s sense of safety
- Why mindfulness and movement can help without bypassing grief
- What healing means when grief is not something we leave behind
- What grief can teach us about love, presence, and connection
At its core, this episode is about learning to carry grief without treating it like something that has to be fixed or erased.
The Carried Forward Podcast is hosted by Robert DelFave, grief coach, David Kessler Certified Grief Educator, and author of The Other Side of This. Robert works with grieving teenagers and the adults who used to be them.
What is Carried Forward?
Grief doesn't end, it transforms.
The Carried Forward Podcast is a conversation-driven show about what happens after loss. Not the moment of loss itself, but the long, slow, often invisible work of rebuilding identity, meaning, and purpose on the other side of it.
Host Robert DelFave is a grief coach, author, and someone who lost both parents young. He sits down with grief professionals, researchers, therapists, authors, and thought leaders to ask the questions his clients are living with every day. What does carrying grief forward actually look like? How do you rebuild who you are on the other side of this?