David Kessler on the Sixth Stage of Grief: Finding Meaning, Triggers and Unattended Grief

High-Level Overview

Lewis Howes sits down with David Kessler, one of the world's best-known grief experts and a longtime collaborator of psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, to talk about what grief really is and how to move through it. Kessler defines grief broadly as a change we didn't want, which covers a death but also a divorce, a breakup or a job loss. He explains how the death of his younger son, David, sent him from teaching grief to living it, and how that experience led him to add a sixth stage, meaning, to the five stages Kubler-Ross first observed. From there the two talk about witnessing, unfelt feelings, men and emotion, triggers, unattended grief, success that fails to heal old pain, and the decision to live again.

The tone is warm, intimate and at times raw. Both men speak openly about their own histories, including Howes's account of childhood sexual abuse and Kessler's loss of his mother to a shooting when he was young. The conversation moves back and forth between personal story, practical advice on feelings and relationships, and Kessler's hopeful message that grief and a full life can coexist.

The Discussion Explores:

• The five stages of grief, and why Kessler added meaning as a sixth after his son died
• Bargaining as the mind's way of avoiding a world where we have no control
• Why grief must be witnessed, and why we also need someone to witness our capacity to recover
• Feelings as passing information, the cost of unfelt feelings, and how men process emotion
• Unattended grief showing up as automatic anger and self-sabotage
• Triggers as a map to your pain and to your healing
• Why success and money don't heal old wounds, and why so many people feel unworthy
• Anxiety about the future, the difference between grief and depression, and the importance of support

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

From Five Stages to a Sixth: Meaning

Kessler explains that Kubler-Ross did not invent the five stages; she observed them in people: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. He stresses that there isn't one big acceptance but many small ones, and that the stages apply as much to a breakup or job loss as to a death. That is why he has lectured at companies like Coca-Cola and General Mills: companies want to learn how to manage change, and grief is about change. His summary is simple: if you grieve well, you live well.

About nine years ago, when Kessler thought his grief was long behind him, his younger son, David, died unexpectedly. The expert who had handed out grief-group referrals like candy at Halloween found excuses to skip his own group twice, and on the third visit sat among other bereaved parents with his own books on the table, unable to be anyone but a father who had buried a child. Acceptance felt like a low baseline, so he went back to Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. His key insight was that the meaning is not in the horrible event; it is in us, in who we become afterward. His son loved his work and would not have wanted his death to shrink it, so Kessler decided to expand it. The Kubler-Ross family allowed him to call meaning the sixth stage, and he says he began getting glimpses of it around two years after the loss.

Bargaining and the Illusion of Control

Kessler says he spent the most time in bargaining, the what-ifs and if-onlys, and still visits it from time to time. Bargaining is natural early on, but over time it becomes the mind's way of avoiding reality. He explains that the mind would rather feel guilty than helpless: it would rather keep turning a Rubik's Cube of what we should have done than accept a world where you can be fired after years at a company, or where everything is fine and then someone dies.

Losing his son forced him to see that he has illusions of control but no real control, except over how he experiences this moment and what he says yes and no to. He describes standing at his son's grave with his older son on their first Christmas after the death. His son said they were never doing the holidays again, and Kessler replied that he felt that way too but would hate to think the two of them would never share another holiday. For people who cannot yet see a way forward, he offers to carry it for them: "I'll hold hope until you can find it."

Grief Must Be Witnessed, and So Must Our Capacity

One of Kessler's central lines is that grief must be witnessed. Grief is a severance, and connection is what heals both grief and trauma, so a person in pain needs someone to say, in effect, that job meant a lot and I'm so sorry. But he adds a second step that people often skip: after witnessing the pain, witness the person's capacity. That means saying something like, this is awful, and I also know who you are and I know you can turn this around.

Howes shares how this worked for him. For 25 years he told no one he had been sexually abused as a child, and he thought about it almost daily. At an emotional intelligence workshop, hearing 40 or 50 strangers open up made him feel safe enough to speak, and that began a long healing process. Kessler notes that we find ourselves, and our healing, in each other's stories, and that while all grief does not have trauma, all trauma has grief: survivors also need to grieve the lost innocence and the childhood they never got. When loved ones react badly, Kessler compares looking for understanding in the wrong place to searching a hardware store for milk. It's a grief illiterate world, he says, which is why grief groups have existed for so long: you need people who know.

Feelings Are Data, Not Facts

Kessler says we can't order feelings like dishes at a restaurant: if we want love, we have to let everything else in too. People in his workshops cried harder but also laughed harder than the groups next door. Grief and love are a package deal this lifetime. Holding feelings down is like holding a beach ball underwater; it takes enormous energy. He tells people that feelings aren't facts, just information that will pass, and warns against having a feeling about a feeling (I'm sad, but others have it worse), which leaves us with a bag of half-felt feelings. Feelings also lie about their permanence: no feeling is final, and no feeling is forever.

On crying, he tells people who fear they will never stop that everyone stops eventually, and he challenges men who say they can't cry by recalling the firefighters he worked alongside at 9/11 who cried while digging for their brothers. Saying you should be crying is a judgment, and judgment demands punishment. With men, he suggests talking while walking side by side rather than face to face, and meeting them where they are: if they can only say what they think, their thinking will reveal their feelings. For parents like Howes, who has twin daughters, the model is the same: don't shut a child's sadness down or shame it; witness it and then point to their capacity to still have a good afternoon. Kessler traces his own path into this work to his mother's death after a shooting when he was young, when the only advice he got in a hospital stairwell was be strong.

Unattended Grief and Triggers

Kessler explains that the famous athlete or celebrity who suddenly blows up their life is often acting out unattended grief: they never learned to handle the everyday disappointments and changes, so the big moment overwhelmed them. The signs are automatic reactions you can't explain, unexplained sadness or anger. He says anger is often grief, describing anger as pain's bodyguard. Howes recognizes himself: he was getting into altercations on pickup basketball courts in West Hollywood almost weekly, until a fistfight and his best friend Matt's refusal to keep playing with him forced him to see that the problem was him.

Kessler is skeptical of a culture of trigger warnings that tries to control the outside world. Instead, he says, "Your triggers are a map to your pain and they are a map to your healing." Avoiding every trigger leads to emotional avoidance, while facing them builds capacity. When someone leaves one of his events because the room is too painful, he tells them to take care of themselves but not to think the pain stays behind, because it leaves with them. His summary: "what we run from pursues us and what we face transforms us." Howes adds that his healing deepened when he finally shared his story publicly, in what he says is still his most downloaded episode and which led to his book The Mask of Masculinity. Kessler's definition of healing is when the event no longer controls you.

Success, Worthiness and Relationships

Howes admits that the more he achieved, the worse he felt, because success didn't take the pain away. Kessler quips that success is a great deodorant, and shares a story attributed to Freud, who said he would rather treat a rich person because they already know happiness isn't in the money. Howes adds that money actually amplified his anxiety and suspicion of others. Asked what people struggle with most, Kessler says it is feeling unworthy and not whole, because we are raised to do and become more rather than knowing our worth comes simply from being here. He reminds busy providers that if you are not home more now, success will only take you further away, and compares life to a game of Monopoly: play it well, but don't believe you are the game.

For someone whose partner is stuck in unresolved grief, Kessler recommends invitations and boundaries. Boundaries are for yourself, since only you can let them be crossed. Offer many invitations, such as therapy or doing the work together, accept that partners can have different interests, and only after real effort consider that people can outgrow a relationship. More broadly, he notes that we have the power to stay or go but not to change other people, and that naming what someone does well gets further than nagging.

Presence, the Future and the Decision to Live Again

Kessler says the worst tragedy would not have been his son's death but never having come into this world and met him. Seeing so much death makes him more present: if today were his last day and he has kept his relationships current, he can simply go deeper into the moment. Anxiety, he explains, is living in the future because something from the past is asking for attention, and love and connection only happen in the present. He coaches anxious people to share what's going on with a friend for part of their time together and then be fully present for the friend. He is clear that telling grief from clinical depression is a question for a psychiatrist who knows grief, and notes that professionals can qualify without one hour of grief education. He also worries that humanity will give its power away, whether to leaders or to AI, even as he uses his own curated AI to support grieving people at any hour.

Howes shares the story of a remarried widow who felt guilty for being happy. Kessler calls that a story of disloyalty and explains how he faced it himself: he imagines meeting his son in the afterlife and being asked about Earth, and answering that he only grieved. He could have become the grief expert who never left his house, but living again was a decision, one we all make every day. His one prescription is to get support: talk to a friend, join a group, and if you can't connect, go volunteer. His three final truths are that love is all that matters, to take in the good, and to be yourself, which he calls the hardest thing of all. He defines greatness as showing up fully for others and yourself. He also mentions his Tender Hearts online grief groups at grief.com, with 26 groups by type of loss, several time zones, and no one turned away for lack of funds, plus a free video at aboutgrief.com and a grief educator certificate program.

Conclusion

Kessler's message is that grief is part of any life lived fully, and that avoiding it means avoiding love and life itself. Healing comes from letting feelings pass instead of fighting them, being witnessed by people who understand, using triggers as a map rather than something to hide from, and finally choosing to find meaning in who we become after a loss. Paired with Howes's candid story of carrying and then releasing his own childhood trauma, the conversation offers both comfort and practical steps for anyone facing a death, a divorce, a job loss or any change they didn't want.

This is a summary of "The Grief Expert Who Discovered a Sixth Stage | David Kessler" from The School of Greatness, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.