Note sull'episodio
Every loss changes the shape of the life around it. Some losses are announced with funerals and flowers. Others happen quietly, without ceremony, and nobody thinks to ask how you are doing.
In this episode of The Original Self Podcast, Evet DeCota is joined by her brother Stefan DeCota for an honest and deeply personal conversation about grief, identity, and who we become when someone or something we love is gone. Stefan is a strategic business advisor with twenty-five years of experience inside large startups and data companies, but what he brings to this conversation has nothing to do with business. It has everything to do with having loved deeply, lost significantly, and still standing.
Together, they explore five dimensions of loss that rarely get the attention they deserve. The grief of losing a friendship that ends without a conversation. The identity crisis that follows the end of a significant relationship. The particular absence left by losing a parent — the people who knew you longest, the witnesses to your own story. The quiet grief of outgrowing people you love. And the loss of the version of yourself that existed before all of it.
Woven throughout the conversation are three psychological frameworks that give language to what so many people carry silently. Dr. Pauline Boss's Ambiguous Loss Theory describes the grief that lacks ceremony and social recognition. Research from Nature Reviews Neuroscience and from Duke and Yale Universities confirms that social loss registers in the brain as genuine physical pain. And Continuing Bonds Theory, developed by Klass, Silverman, and Nickman, challenges the idea that healthy grieving means letting go — suggesting instead that we carry those we have lost forward into who we are becoming.
As C.S. Lewis wrote, grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. That is loss. That is life.
This episode is for anyone who is carrying a loss that the world never permitted them to grieve. You are not alone in what you are holding.
Evet DeCota is an ICF-certified life coach and psychology-informed thinker. To learn more or work with Evet directly, visit decotalifecoaching.com. New episodes of The Original Self Podcast drop weekly.