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Irad Eichler: Sharing Grief in the Time of COVID

The Glam Reaper Podcast
The Glam Reaper Podcast

29 plays · Jul 20, 2021

Welcome to another episode of The Glam Reaper. This time, Jennifer Muldowney is joined by Irad Eichler, founder of "Circles", an online platform that creates Circles of support for people experiencing life crises. Their main topic? Grief. As we are all aware, thanks to the last 2 years with COVID, some of us experienced grief from a loss of a loved one due to COVID-19 and some were separated for a very long time because of lockdowns and travel bans. The Circles platform was established to help people who are facing grief with a loss of a loved one cope with loneliness. But it goes beyond that. They also work with people suffering with anxiety, depression, dealing with chronic diseases, and so forth. This is done through connecting people with the same life issues on their platform in sessions that are led by professional facilitators. Clients who sign up can then start to build meaningful connections and establish relationships with kindred spirits. Stream this episode to learn more about how Circles works and to hear a beautiful story of how the platform brought a group together in real life. Stay tuned and get connected! *This episode was recorded at Christmas 2020, so apologies for the time difference. LITTLE NUGGETS OF GOLD: - An Introduction to Circles - What is the aim of Circles? - How to find Circles and start connecting with people - People who can join Circles - The importance of the right technology in connecting people - How to cope with loneliness Connect with Irad Eichler: Circles Website - https://circlesup.com/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/CirclesSupport Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/circles_support/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/circles-support/ Email: hello@circlesup.com Personal Links LinkedIn - https://il.linkedin.com/in/iradeichler Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/irad.eichler/  Twitter - https://twitter.com/eichlerirad?lang=en Connect with Jennifer/The Glam Reaper: Facebook Page - Muldowney Memorials: https://www.facebook.com/MuldowneyMemorials/ Facebook Page - Rainbow Bridge Memorials: https://www.facebook.com/rainbowbridgememorialsdotcom Instagram - @muldowneymemorials [https://www.instagram.com/muldowneymemorials/] & @jennifermuldowney [https://www.instagram.com/jennifermuldowney/] Twitter - @TheGlamReaper [https://twitter.com/theglamreaper] Email us here: glamreaperpodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

Speaker: Hi, my name is Jennifer Muldenny, aka The Glam Reaper, and this is The Glam Reaper Podcast.

Speaker: This show focuses on stories about love, life and loss, but also with a massive input from the funeral world, since that is the world that I live and breathe in.

Speaker: This week's episode focuses on grief.

Speaker: COVID was a really tough year last year, and we're all in mourning.

Speaker: How can we mourn together when we have to stay so far apart?

Speaker: Please bear in mind that this episode was recorded at Christmas of 2020.

Speaker: Yes, it's taken a long time to get it on air, but we are a baby podcast and we're only getting started.

Speaker: So please bear with us.

Speaker: The information is still as timely as ever.

Speaker: Let's take it away.

Speaker: So, Erad is a gentleman who connected with me on LinkedIn and very fascinating, has a charity called Seven Chairs, which I want to know where the history of that name came from.

Speaker: But you focus very much on grief and grief support.

Speaker: Am I right?

Speaker: Exactly.

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker: So, Erad, you take it away.

Speaker: Tell me what it is that you do.

Speaker: Great.

Speaker: So first, thanks so much for having me.

Speaker: I'm excited to be here.

Speaker: Yeah, as you mentioned, we are a startup, actually, that's aiming to end the loneliness in the world.

Speaker: The thing is that when people are facing grief, for example, they're not just facing the grief and the loss of the loved one, they're also facing the loneliness that comes with it, the feeling that nobody really understands what they're going through.

Speaker: And even their family, friends sometimes don't really get what they're going through because they had a special relationship with the person that they lost, with their loved ones.

Speaker: And that's where we come in.

Speaker: We connect people that are dealing with the same life issue, the same life challenge as the others.

Speaker: For example, grief over child.

Speaker: And we connect parents to a group, small groups of anywhere between six to eight people that are meeting on our platform weekly.

Speaker: And the groups are led by professional facilitators.

Speaker: If you kind of look at the way we live now, most of the kind of our social connections are based on social networks.

Speaker: which I think are anti-social networks because they are taking our relationship and kind of, it's a redundance of the relationship.

Speaker: You could have kind of read, you know, I spoke a thousand times about what we're doing and you could have read it through the website

Speaker: But still the two of us chose to be on the same place, on the same time.

Speaker: Talk to each other, have a relationship and have a meaningful connection as opposed to just communication, you know, just sending email or posting on Facebook.

Speaker: And that's what we are fixing because we know that loneliness comes from lack of human connection.

Speaker: So we work on building a human connection.

Speaker: So, yeah, we started with grief.

Speaker: focusing on grief.

Speaker: We gave support to thousands of people, connected thousands of people, mostly, as you can tell by my accent, in Israel or in the States.

Speaker: We leveraged technology to find the right group for the right people.

Speaker: And we leveraged technology to help the group facilitators to be the best group facilitators that they can in various ways.

Speaker: Yeah, it's a very interesting topic.

Speaker: And you made a lot of points there that I think are just scratching the surface because

Speaker: They do say that as we grow more connected as a world, we grow more disconnected.

Speaker: And I think, you know, the tragedy of COVID-19 and the pandemic that's ripping through the world at the moment has proven that and shown us

Speaker: that while technology can be a support system it absolutely resolutely does not take away the fact of physical connection with people and even as you said us talking today which you know i work in the funeral community and a lot of people when they meet me i've been on the radio i've been on tv and things like that and honestly i'm actually quite a shy person and this podcast has been a brainchild for the last two years

Speaker: but I just don't like the camera being on me or I don't, you know, I like to talk to people.

Speaker: I'm much more of a converser.

Speaker: And I realized that in what I do, exactly to your point, there's so many, it leaves so many people bereft and lonely and wanting more of a connection.

Speaker: And I even find myself, I mean, I would nearly say as a memorial planner, I become people's best friend for the intimate time I work with them.

Speaker: I hold their hand, I've hugged, I've held people as they've broken down.

Speaker: It's a very humbling and incredibly rewarding career for me anyway.

Speaker: One of the things that I wanted when I did this podcast was a it had to be a podcast as opposed to just a blog which I had been doing for years but with a blog you just feel like you're talking to people.

Speaker: It's like Dear Diary or whatever, you know?

Speaker: And even with the podcast, I mean, if it was just me in a room on my own, it could be just me talking to myself, which isn't unusual.

Speaker: But I wanted this to be both audio and visual because I want people to get a sense of it's two people talking to each other as opposed to

Speaker: just two people giving their opinions into your ears and you know some people are audio some people like to see things whatever it's interesting actually that you're as an Irish person I'm living in New York and I'm stuck in New York effectively because I can't go home to my family and we have a new niece that just came into the world last week and honestly

Speaker: I'm a mess.

Speaker: I'm an absolute, I don't mind saying it to the world.

Speaker: I'm an absolute mess.

Speaker: I hear any Christmas song on the radio.

Speaker: I see any reminder of back home in Dublin and it's Christmas and I burst into tears.

Speaker: I got a package in the post last night from my little nephew.

Speaker: He's two and a half and it's his, he's like Van Gogh or Da Vinci.

Speaker: I don't know.

Speaker: I glance at his paintings anyway.

Speaker: and I broke down crying and I feel like I'm just crying constantly right now and it's probably living alone in New York City one of the busiest cities in the world and yet here I am absolutely feeling completely isolated and it is I have a massive network of friends and colleagues and lots of people I can turn to but sometimes you do feel like I can't

Speaker: Is it appropriate for me to say this to people?

Speaker: I'll even decline loads of invitations just because I might not feel it's appropriate in the time or I don't want to bring everybody else's buzz down and stuff.

Speaker: So I think what you're doing is incredible and it's such a good resource for people.

Speaker: Tell me how do people utilize your web?

Speaker: It's a website, not an app, right?

Speaker: App and a website.

Speaker: Okay, so tell me, say for example, if I have a family this weekend that I'm working with that maybe have lost a spouse, how can I facilitate them in sending them to Seven Shares?

Speaker: Totally connects to our vision.

Speaker: At the end of the day,

Speaker: You're living in New York, you grew up in Dublin, you probably went anywhere you're living.

Speaker: You can research the web, you search Google, right?

Speaker: You use Google.

Speaker: When you called a cab, you probably use Uber or any other tech.

Speaker: But when someone is in life crisis, there is nowhere to go.

Speaker: There isn't a place on the web that you can go to and have a meaningful connection.

Speaker: And that's what we are building.

Speaker: answering your question.

Speaker: It's just, you know, they just need to log in into circles.

Speaker: It circles app.com and then we can leave all the links down below.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker: So just need to click and we help them find the group.

Speaker: And that's where technology comes in place because we can use technology to find the right people for you based on age, based on the situation that you're dealing with.

Speaker: And for example,

Speaker: A mother wants to be assigned to the same group as a daughter.

Speaker: They will have different groups because they are dealing with different situations and their peers are others.

Speaker: They have different kind of peers group.

Speaker: That's where technology comes in place.

Speaker: I can tell you a story of one of our colleagues.

Speaker: He had cancer and he was living in L.A.

Speaker: and he was around 40.

Speaker: He's a wealthy man.

Speaker: He can afford whatever mental health service he wants.

Speaker: And he was looking online for support.

Speaker: The only thing that he found was online group support.

Speaker: It was a pre-COVID story.

Speaker: So he drove an hour, went into a room, and he found himself with 70-year-old ladies sitting in the same room with him.

Speaker: And it was like three of them.

Speaker: And he was like, it's so broken.

Speaker: It's unbelievable that I'm 40, and I can't find people

Speaker: that are dealing with cancer, that's where we kick in.

Speaker: Come to the website or the app and search specifically for what they're looking for.

Speaker: Is it like just drop down menus?

Speaker: It's a questionnaire.

Speaker: They actually fill a questionnaire and we help them navigate through the questionnaire.

Speaker: We ask them questions and by learning about them,

Speaker: we kind of find the right group for them with the right set of people for them.

Speaker: So at the end, so it's like a questionnaire, almost like similar to when you apply for online coaching or therapy and you fill out this questionnaire and you get matched with a group though, not a person.

Speaker: Exactly.

Speaker: And the thing is that it's hours away from signing up.

Speaker: So we always have an opening for new people in any kind of segment within maximum a day.

Speaker: They will always find people to speak with and to meet with.

Speaker: And on top of that, we have a daily meeting for open to everyone, 7 p.m.

Speaker: EST.

Speaker: And it's a free meeting, free sessions around grief, facilitated by a mental health professional.

Speaker: People can just log in whenever they want, every weekday.

Speaker: And it's a free service to give them a sense of that they are not alone in the world and there are a lot of people.

Speaker: And I can tell you, it's

Speaker: I was part of one meeting and it was so moving because it started with four ladies joining the meeting and each one of them experienced different loss.

Speaker: But within 10 minutes, the four of them were crying.

Speaker: Crying from both pain, but relief as well.

Speaker: All of them started with their cameras off, so nobody could see each other.

Speaker: But at the end of the meeting, like 10 minutes before the meeting's ending, all of them turned their cameras on.

Speaker: And it was kind of like a,

Speaker: The excitement in the room was amazing and all of them changed phone numbers and emails and they're connected with each other and they're still connected.

Speaker: How do you facilitate these group meetings?

Speaker: Is it through Zoom?

Speaker: Is it through your own platform?

Speaker: How does that work?

Speaker: It's through our own platform.

Speaker: We do use the capacities of Zoom through our own platform.

Speaker: I'll give you an example.

Speaker: Why do we insist on doing it our way?

Speaker: Because for example, when you sit in a room, now we're talking, I can look at you, but I can also look at myself, which is pretty strange.

Speaker: Usually when you meet people, you don't have the image of yourself on top of the person that you speak with.

Speaker: Absolutely, yeah.

Speaker: It's a small feature, but yet,

Speaker: gives a different experience.

Speaker: And that's what we're aiming to build the ultimate experience of a group online and to really, really, really facilitate relationship between people that can really support each other and building the group together.

Speaker: So that's the reason why we are using it.

Speaker: How do you prevent, obviously with COVID, we've all seen the dangers of these Zoom meetings and people crashing them.

Speaker: Now, a grief support group is obviously a very tender and emotional moment in time for those people.

Speaker: So how can you prevent somebody from crashing that?

Speaker: And there are unfortunately sick people out in the world, so people want to do bad things to already hurting people.

Speaker: So how can you prevent that?

Speaker: How do Seven Shares prevent that from happening?

Speaker: For us, it's the most important thing.

Speaker: At the end of the day, what we are doing is we're building safe places for people.

Speaker: And if they want to be safe,

Speaker: It's counterproductive because, as you said, people are hurting.

Speaker: So first of all, all of our system is protected and people can't join a meeting because it's not an open room that people can join, except from the everyday meeting that I mentioned.

Speaker: But we have a gatekeeper.

Speaker: The gatekeeper is the group facilitator.

Speaker: So nobody can get in unless the group facilitator allows them in.

Speaker: In any time, the group facilitator can just throw people out and stop their participation.

Speaker: There aren't any unsupervised

Speaker: meetings, all our meetings are supervised, the group facilitators know each other, it's small groups, it's intimate group, it's anywhere between six to eight people, so they know each other, kind of like think of a room and everybody knows each other, then even if someone that you don't know gets in, like everybody knows this team and they're like... Of course, yeah, a person who just arrived in the back.

Speaker: Is there a fee for this?

Speaker: Yes, so I would say part of our mission to give the BACS mental health services

Speaker: as accessible as possible.

Speaker: So accessible could be, you know, using the internet and then even someone from rural Texas can join a meeting on one hand and also pricing wise.

Speaker: So the cost is $15 per week, $60 per month, which is 10% of any other mental health service you can consume out there.

Speaker: And that's the reason we can do it is because we're using groups.

Speaker: So the cost splits between all the members

Speaker: And that's what makes it accessible for the people.

Speaker: Actually, when we designed the way we want to provide services to people and kind of like fight loneliness, we knew that first of all, we want to be a startup because when you're a startup,

Speaker: You can provide, you can grow fast and you're not dependent as opposed to foundation or being dependent on donations.

Speaker: So once we will have a solid business model, which is accessible to the people on one hand, but still viable and scalable, then we can grow fast.

Speaker: And at the end of the day, we are imagining, you know, the mother of a child in Australia and father in Belgium and grandmother in Virginia.

Speaker: We want to reach each one of them as fast as we can.

Speaker: There's a real sense of urgency for us.

Speaker: Every morning that we wake up, we understand that there's another morning that we didn't provide services to people that are still suffering in the world.

Speaker: That's what keeps us moving.

Speaker: Sounds fantastic.

Speaker: And it definitely sounds like something I know a lot of the families I work with absolutely need.

Speaker: And even if it's for $60 a month, well, that's what the price of it's not even, is it even 10 coffees these days?

Speaker: The price just keeps going up every time I go to Starbucks for the price of 10 coffees to have that.

Speaker: group now do you have a certain for example i know people that may get busy they may just want this as a backup they may want to be a member of the group to dip in once a month they may not want to kind of go every week do you have a criteria or anything at the moment it's kind of a personalized program and they build it with the group facilitator so it's kind of setting expectation but the thing about the group and that's what why we encourage members to come every week

Speaker: is because it's not just for you.

Speaker: You're coming for yourself to get support, but you need to remember that every time that you show up for a group, you actually provide support to the other members that came.

Speaker: So that's something that the codependence here works both ways.

Speaker: So we do accept people not coming every week, and we know there's a lot of things that are going on, but we do expect, first of all, people to let the group know about it and also to kind of let the other members know.

Speaker: People are depending on you in that way and you can really help people.

Speaker: That's the charm in the group.

Speaker: Yeah, and that's, I mean, in many ways, it's a beautiful sentiment because I know a lot of grieving families that I've worked with where they might not show up for themselves, but they'd show up for somebody else.

Speaker: And I think that's a lot of people these days is that I'll do for somebody else that I won't necessarily do for myself, you know?

Speaker: and that's actually a very important part of it and the fact that it is a group therapy and how many members are active at the moment or do you have that information or yeah we do have the information and we provide service to hundreds of people every week and accumulated we serve over 5 000 people during the few months that we've been around and i can tell you that the demand

Speaker: It's unbelievable, like in terms of the things that people are facing and we're getting requests for group, not just for grief.

Speaker: We're getting for depression, anxiety, loneliness, people that are dealing with any kind of chronic disease, cancer and so on and so forth.

Speaker: That's interesting that you say that because like when I decided to do this podcast, while I might work in the funeral community, I didn't want it to be a podcast about death.

Speaker: So that's why it's very much about love, life and loss, because all three of those work in tangent.

Speaker: And it's it can be the loss of a spouse.

Speaker: And that can be due to divorce, due to death, due to separation, illness.

Speaker: There's so much loss of a job.

Speaker: We deal with so many losses through life, not just life itself.

Speaker: But I think it's so important for us to talk about it and also not judge each other.

Speaker: I mean, I did a whole TED talk about exactly that topic about the loss of my dog.

Speaker: If anybody hasn't seen it, they should watch it.

Speaker: It's only five minutes.

Speaker: Yeah, I did.

Speaker: It was amazing.

Speaker: Thank you.

Speaker: The amount of people who've reached out to me and say, oh, my God, that totally resonated with me.

Speaker: And I did not think you were going the direction you were going.

Speaker: Because it is.

Speaker: It's such a, I don't want to say frowned upon, because it's not frowned upon by the pet community.

Speaker: But outside of that,

Speaker: Comparing the loss of a dog to the loss of any human life is just sacrilegious in so many circles.

Speaker: And so I do think it's important for people to get the support they need in whatever circles they need it from.

Speaker: So I absolutely think what you're doing is incredible.

Speaker: And I can only believe that it's going to go from strength to strength because unfortunately, and especially this year, we are...

Speaker: highlighting even more the losses that we're all suffering.

Speaker: I mean, there's job loss, financial loss, illnesses, death, it's loss of friendships.

Speaker: I, for example, even in living in New York, I don't know how many of my friends have moved back home to Ireland permanently.

Speaker: So my entire social circle has changed, you know, as well as my job, as well as my financial situation, as well as the lack of

Speaker: going home to for a hulk from my dad or whatever it might be you know can i ask especially considering the start and we will come back to i want you to tell me about what's happening at christmas which i don't think this will be aired in time but i think it's we should record it anyway and so um

Speaker: whether we use it or not, or somehow we can at least talk about it.

Speaker: But before we get into that, considering at the start where we were talking about how technology is both bringing us together and separating us, disconnecting us because we have, I check in on Facebook and okay, I've told a hundred people that I'm alive and good.

Speaker: Will you, do you foresee, ERAD, any future where you'll have this as physical communities worldwide?

Speaker: So definitely, I think at the end of the day, we need to leverage technology, kind of ignite human connection and connect people.

Speaker: But I see it as a ladder.

Speaker: You climb the ladder, but at the end of the day, if you want to reach the top, the top is human connections face to face.

Speaker: Having said that, I think as a startup, as a company, as a movement, what we want to really do is kind of

Speaker: help people connect.

Speaker: Actually, we saw it in so many groups.

Speaker: I can tell you about one group here in Israel.

Speaker: Israel is not that big.

Speaker: It's kind of like smaller than the state of New York, but we had a group of people, the caregivers for cancer patients.

Speaker: After the sixth meeting, one of the members, her spouse died.

Speaker: All the group on the seventh meeting drove two hours to meet her.

Speaker: They came all together to her house with the group facilitators.

Speaker: and the meeting was in her home.

Speaker: So that's one example.

Speaker: Another example is... That's so powerful.

Speaker: Oh my God.

Speaker: Women with breast cancer, that's kind of one of them went through an operation and she was in a meeting while lying... The operation was in the morning, in the afternoon she was lying in the hospital participating in a group meeting dedicated just to her after the operation.

Speaker: So technology, again, it's kind of a... It's a ladder.

Speaker: We climbed the ladder,

Speaker: We are like, everybody's down there.

Speaker: We need to get everybody on the ladder, connect again and get up there and be together.

Speaker: Absolutely.

Speaker: With meaningful connections, spending real time like we do right now in conversation, in interaction, as opposed to texting and so on.

Speaker: And it is, it's so easy to fire off a text to 20 people saying the same thing or sending an email, group email to everybody, but

Speaker: While there's definitely a place for all the WhatsApp groups and the Facebooks and the LinkedIn and even TikTok and all of those, they shouldn't replace

Speaker: physical connection and emotional connection they should just supplement it really and it's something I try and use social media for if I'm going on a trip for example well I know from staying in touch with all of these people through the social media that oh I can reach out to x y and z and hopefully meet them whereas without social media I wouldn't have had that

Speaker: You know, those are the type of conversations I have with my parents when they wonder what's the point of having 850 friends on Facebook.

Speaker: There's a certain amount, you know, you have to keep private.

Speaker: Some people do.

Speaker: as we say back home in Ireland, air their dirty laundry all over social media, which, I mean, I guess that's their therapy.

Speaker: But yeah, it's definitely, as long as it's used in the appropriate way.

Speaker: And I mean, those two stories are just, they'd send shivers up my spine.

Speaker: Like, that's a really powerful thing.

Speaker: Seven strangers traveling over two hours for somebody that they were estranged from, that they didn't know.

Speaker: On top of that, it was a chat group.

Speaker: It even wasn't a video group.

Speaker: That means that they just texted each other for an hour every week for six weeks.

Speaker: And then the relationship was so intimate that they felt compassion and they felt that they need to go and be with her.

Speaker: So it was literally the first time that they met.

Speaker: And I'd say the bond is still massive there.

Speaker: Yeah, it's kind of like that one.

Speaker: Do they take the group off your app and off the website and sort of do their own thing?

Speaker: And is that something you encourage or do you encourage people to sort of maintain, obviously with the facilitator and stuff?

Speaker: We do encourage people to connect.

Speaker: If you want people to connect, you can't control the connection.

Speaker: So we definitely allow people to connect and take off the connection of the platform.

Speaker: The platform is not a communication.

Speaker: platform.

Speaker: What we offer is a facilitated process.

Speaker: You actually pay not for the technology, you pay for the matching services and you mostly pay for the group for the facilitation.

Speaker: And in our vision, platform will be open to groups that are not facilitated and they won't be charged.

Speaker: It's kind of the way we see

Speaker: Our platform evolved, but it always will be around human connection and we definitely encourage people to build relationships, to meet, to talk.

Speaker: We want to be there for them, but once they are not lonely anymore,

Speaker: they can kind of continue with their life.

Speaker: I can imagine you might even evolve into becoming a dating website.

Speaker: I can imagine, you know, there's people, there's been movies written about it where people meet in various different meetings where they're going through similar things in life and develop a connection that can turn into a romantic and loving connection, especially when both have lost spouses, maybe, or children.

Speaker: And as we know, the loss of a child is incredibly important

Speaker: painful and hard on any marriage.

Speaker: So yeah, I can imagine there could be a few seven chair weddings in the next decade or so.

Speaker: You never know.

Speaker: Where did the name come from?

Speaker: First of all, we launched our new brand and now we're no longer Seven Chairs, we're now Circles.

Speaker: Yeah, it happened just now.

Speaker: And so it's kind of like breaking news.

Speaker: Seven Chairs is now Circles, not Seven Circles.

Speaker: And the reason we call it Seven Chairs is because we realized that kind of the magic number of group is seven people.

Speaker: So that's kind of why we call it Seven Chairs.

Speaker: But we realized that in order to change the world and to be big, we want to talk about circles as opposed to chairs.

Speaker: Because circles kind of give you a sense of equality.

Speaker: Everybody is equal to each other.

Speaker: Everybody is sitting in a kind of a round circle.

Speaker: Having said that, our logo is not round.

Speaker: It's kind of a

Speaker: twisted round circle because we know that all of us are different as well and all circles are different so and that's the magic like you go into a room with six people and there's a certain dynamic and then if you go to another room with different six people then there's a different dynamic that's the magic basically amazing okay and you guys tell me about the christmas initiative that i'm jumping on board with and that you're helping me

Speaker: helping will will help to promote so tell us about that

Speaker: So, yeah, first of all, thank you for that.

Speaker: And I think I didn't tell you a little bit about my background, but I founded an organization about supporting people with a mental health issue here in Israel.

Speaker: And we realized that during the holidays, we saw that there is a huge collapse in the situation.

Speaker: People, they made progress within two years and then comes the holidays.

Speaker: They feel so alone.

Speaker: And then a walk of two years just disappear and they stop talking and they kind of like they hospitalized themselves and so on and so forth.

Speaker: When you look at holidays for people that lost their loved ones, and talking from my own experience, I lost my mother.

Speaker: You know, the first holiday, the second holiday, there's this empty chair that nobody sits in it.

Speaker: And there's the family's there, but then the absence is more clear than, you know, in your daily routine.

Speaker: And that's where people really feel alone.

Speaker: And we realized that the holidays are coming.

Speaker: And there's a huge opportunity for us to make the difference.

Speaker: So we decided as a company to open our services and have three days just before Christmas, Monday to Wednesday.

Speaker: We're going to have three sessions, online sessions.

Speaker: People can connect from anywhere.

Speaker: All of them will be facilitated and people that will join in will get tools to deal with the loneliness, deal with absence of their loved ones.

Speaker: And they will also meet people that lost the love.

Speaker: And they feel they can feel together.

Speaker: They can feel part of something.

Speaker: I want to kind of build up the things that you said before.

Speaker: When you lose someone, there's like two things that really happens to you.

Speaker: First of all, you feel that you lost control of your life.

Speaker: There's a certain control of life.

Speaker: And we know that everybody's here.

Speaker: Everybody is alive.

Speaker: And then when somebody dies, you feel that you lost control of your life.

Speaker: Something that was certain became uncertain.

Speaker: Kind of like,

Speaker: so that's one thing and the second thing is that you have all these kind of thoughts what will happen to me what will happen with my children should i will i die soon and then you feel a little bit crazy and losing control of your life and feeling a little bit crazy can really easily be normalized if you meet people that are feeling experiencing the same experience and that's the essence of what we're doing we're kind of connecting people that are dealing with the same things and normalizing their experience and making

Speaker: bring a little bit relief into their pain and that's what we are going to do in the holidays.

Speaker: This is going to be three days?

Speaker: Exactly.

Speaker: 21st, 22nd, 23rd.

Speaker: Yes.

Speaker: 21st, 23rd of December and there will be three sessions each day open to the public.

Speaker: You don't need the questionnaire to get in or it's

Speaker: No, you just need to log in and that's it.

Speaker: You don't have to... And it will be facilitated by a grief counsellor report?

Speaker: Social workers, grief support, but all of them are mental health professionals that are trained by us.

Speaker: I'll just say again the dates so we won't get them wrong.

Speaker: So 21st, 22nd, 23rd of December.

Speaker: Yeah?

Speaker: Okay, yeah.

Speaker: and free sessions each day and you can get that information on your website which is circlesapp.com circlesapp.com okay exactly okay great so we might not more than likely I won't have that this out but what I might do is if I have the editing done in time I might edit that little bit out to to share on social media or whatever and that'll help tease for this episode anyway so double double on me

Speaker: Yeah, that's it, I think.

Speaker: Thank you so much.

Speaker: It was such a pleasure.

Speaker: No problem.

Speaker: Thank you for having me.

Speaker: No problem at all.

Speaker: Thank you so much for listening to the Glam Reaper podcast.

Speaker: It has been something I've been working on and muddling with for over two years now.

Speaker: So I appreciate your time to listen in.

Speaker: Every episode will have a new guest we hope you will find interesting as they tell their own story.

Speaker: So stay tuned for the next episode or have a look through the Glam Reaper episode collection.

Speaker: Find your nugget of gold as we talk all things life, love and loss with a dash from the funeral world.

Speaker: Until next time.

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